I suspect that if transformative AI is 20 or even 30 years away, AI will still be doing really big, impressive things in 2033, and people at that time will get a sense that even more impressive things are soon to come. In that case, I don’t think many people will think that AI safety advocates in 2023 were crying wolf, since one decade is not very long, and the importance of the technology will have only become more obvious in the meantime.
Hmm, fwiw, I spontaneously think something like this is overwhelmingly likely.
Even in the (imo unlikely) case of AI research basically stagnating from now on, I expect AI applications to have effects that will significantly affect the broader public and not make them think anything close to “what a nothingburger” (e.g. like I’ve heard it happen for nanotechnology). E.g. I’m thinking of things like the broad availabiltiy of personal assistants & AI companions, automating of increasingly many tasks, impacts on education, on the productivity of software developers.
And in case we’ll also see a stagnation of significant applications, I expect this would be caused by some external event (e.g. say a severe economic or financial crisis) that will also make people not think of the current moment as crying wolf.
I don’t think that this is how policy discussions will actually work in those long-timeline worlds. Seeing impressive things means that people will benefit from AI systems, it will appear pretty harmless, and because the posited risks haven’t actually caused large-scale harm, there will be less willingness to admit that the risks exist, and there will absolutely be claims that AI risk “doomers” cried wolf and slowed down something wonderful and “ultimately” harmless. (Until it turns out that the doomers were right, and are hailed as prophets, but too late to matter.)
On the other hand, the most likely alternative is that we see lots of near-term harms, and we get lots of opposition on the basis of job loss, misinformation, and similar—but I’m skeptical that this pushes in the direction of safer AI systems, and might instead simply lead to tons of research that increases capability and risk, but has limits on industry deployment.
I’d be very surprised if AI will predominantly be considered risk-free in long-timelines worlds. The more AI will be integrated into the world, the more it will interact with and cause harmful events/processes/behaviors/etc., like take the chatbot that apparently facilitated a suicide.
And I take Snoop Doggs reaction to recent AI progress as somewhat representative of a more general attitude that will get stronger even with relatively slow and mostly benign progress
Well I got a motherf*cking AI right now that they did made for me. This n***** could talk to me. I’m like, man this thing can hold a real conversation? Like real for real? Like it’s blowing my mind because I watched movies on this as a kid years ago. When I see this sh*t I’m like what is going on? And I heard the dude, the old dude that created AI saying, “This is not safe, ’cause the AIs got their own minds, and these motherf*ckers gonna start doing their own sh*t. I’m like, are we in a f*cking movie right now, or what? The f*ck man?
I.e. it will continuously feel weird and novel and worth pondering where AI progress is going and where the risks are, and more serious people will join doing this which will again increase the credbility of those concerns.
“Considered risk free” is very different than what I discussed, which is that the broad public will see much more benefit, and have little direct experience of the types of harms that we’re concerned about. Weird and novel won’t change the public’s minds about the technology, if they benefit, and the “more serious people” in the west who drive the narrative, namely, politicians, pundits, and celebrities, still have the collective attention span of a fish. And in the mean time, RLHF will keep LLMs from going rogue, they will be beneficial, and it will seem fine to everyone not thinking deeply about the risk.
I suspect that if transformative AI is 20 or even 30 years away, AI will still be doing really big, impressive things in 2033, and people at that time will get a sense that even more impressive things are soon to come. In that case, I don’t think many people will think that AI safety advocates in 2023 were crying wolf, since one decade is not very long, and the importance of the technology will have only become more obvious in the meantime.
Yes, I think this is plausible-to-likely, and is a strong counter-argument to the concern I raise here.
Hmm, fwiw, I spontaneously think something like this is overwhelmingly likely.
Even in the (imo unlikely) case of AI research basically stagnating from now on, I expect AI applications to have effects that will significantly affect the broader public and not make them think anything close to “what a nothingburger” (e.g. like I’ve heard it happen for nanotechnology). E.g. I’m thinking of things like the broad availabiltiy of personal assistants & AI companions, automating of increasingly many tasks, impacts on education, on the productivity of software developers.
And in case we’ll also see a stagnation of significant applications, I expect this would be caused by some external event (e.g. say a severe economic or financial crisis) that will also make people not think of the current moment as crying wolf.
I don’t think that this is how policy discussions will actually work in those long-timeline worlds. Seeing impressive things means that people will benefit from AI systems, it will appear pretty harmless, and because the posited risks haven’t actually caused large-scale harm, there will be less willingness to admit that the risks exist, and there will absolutely be claims that AI risk “doomers” cried wolf and slowed down something wonderful and “ultimately” harmless. (Until it turns out that the doomers were right, and are hailed as prophets, but too late to matter.)
On the other hand, the most likely alternative is that we see lots of near-term harms, and we get lots of opposition on the basis of job loss, misinformation, and similar—but I’m skeptical that this pushes in the direction of safer AI systems, and might instead simply lead to tons of research that increases capability and risk, but has limits on industry deployment.
I’d be very surprised if AI will predominantly be considered risk-free in long-timelines worlds. The more AI will be integrated into the world, the more it will interact with and cause harmful events/processes/behaviors/etc., like take the chatbot that apparently facilitated a suicide.
And I take Snoop Doggs reaction to recent AI progress as somewhat representative of a more general attitude that will get stronger even with relatively slow and mostly benign progress
I.e. it will continuously feel weird and novel and worth pondering where AI progress is going and where the risks are, and more serious people will join doing this which will again increase the credbility of those concerns.
“Considered risk free” is very different than what I discussed, which is that the broad public will see much more benefit, and have little direct experience of the types of harms that we’re concerned about. Weird and novel won’t change the public’s minds about the technology, if they benefit, and the “more serious people” in the west who drive the narrative, namely, politicians, pundits, and celebrities, still have the collective attention span of a fish. And in the mean time, RLHF will keep LLMs from going rogue, they will be beneficial, and it will seem fine to everyone not thinking deeply about the risk.