They are, but I'm advocating for this to become a cultural norm among developers to start thinking hard about AI safety, instead of dismissing it as either farfetched or thinking purely about all the new cool things that can be done with new AI capabilities and not thinking as hard about safety concerns.
Essentially I'm advocating for terms such as "AI alignment" and "AI safety" to be taken seriously by the developer community at large. They're ridiculously difficult problems as is, but are impossible to solve if they remain niche topics that are viewed as dubious problems to work on by the technology community at large.
There is AI safety in the seat belt sense, avoiding rm *; but there are also systemic risks that we delegate more to data and AI controls that data. AI could enslave us before it is even sentient, by creating systems we cannot escape. The black mirror where the woman tries to get a coveted 5 star rating springs to mind. If 2 stars makes you a global persona non grata and AI controls the stars, the AI could evolve to take advantage and make human programmers make it more powerful.
A self driving research team removed the automatic breaking capability from their cars because it was "problematic" resulting in the car killing a woman.
Are you talking about Google or Facebook?
First, John Carmack, who's actively trying to develop AGI full-time, seems to be downplaying the importance of AI safety.
> The AI can't "escape", because the execution environments are going to be specialized -- it isn't going to run a fragment on your cell phone.
> I feel pretty good about the AI future.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1456658782474354693
40% of researchers surveyed here https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/ answered "less valuable" to the question "How valuable is it to work on this problem today, compared to other problems in AI?."
But as I mention, the examples I'm mainly thinking of are the developer community at large. Even on HN, we have pretty prominent folks who view the term "AI safety" with a considerable amount of derision.
> Also: tens of millions in donations to "AI safety" organizations. Yes, to answer the Economist; this movement is irretrievable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33619536
and from a post that garnered > 800 upvotes on HN: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
> So I'd like to engage AI risk from both these perspectives. I think the arguments for superintelligence are somewhat silly, and full of unwarranted assumptions.
> But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
AI safety needs to be legitimized as a respectable topic in the technological community.