I don’t know how useful the results are, as extinction is not the only existentially catastrophic scenario I care about. And I wonder if and how the ranking changes when the question is about existential catastrophe. For example, do people think AI is unlikely to cause extinction but likely to cause a bad form of human disempowerment?
I think that would also be interesting, but there’s still value in replicating previous surveys which focused on extinction specifically.
I also think that focus on extinction specifically may also be useful for tracking changes in concerns about severe risks from AI. Assessing perceptions of other severe risks from AI will be a lot more methodologically challenging (since there’s more of a continuum from very severe non-extinction threats to less severe threats (e.g. will harm autonomy in some much less severe way), so it will be difficult to ensure respondents are thinking of non-extinction threats which are of interest to us. That said, I agree that studying what non-extinction threats people perceive from AI would be independently interesting and important.
Thanks for doing this!
I don’t know how useful the results are, as extinction is not the only existentially catastrophic scenario I care about. And I wonder if and how the ranking changes when the question is about existential catastrophe. For example, do people think AI is unlikely to cause extinction but likely to cause a bad form of human disempowerment?
Thanks Siebe!
I think that would also be interesting, but there’s still value in replicating previous surveys which focused on extinction specifically.
I also think that focus on extinction specifically may also be useful for tracking changes in concerns about severe risks from AI. Assessing perceptions of other severe risks from AI will be a lot more methodologically challenging (since there’s more of a continuum from very severe non-extinction threats to less severe threats (e.g. will harm autonomy in some much less severe way), so it will be difficult to ensure respondents are thinking of non-extinction threats which are of interest to us. That said, I agree that studying what non-extinction threats people perceive from AI would be independently interesting and important.