If only we would fight for the real issues like climate change, instead of fantasies that would be great.
I've heard these arguments many times and they never make sense to me. Most of the people I know working on AI do so precisely because they want to solve the "real issues" like climate change and believe that radically accelerating scientific innovation via AI is the key to doing so.
And some fraction of those people also worry that if AI -> AGI (accidentally or intentionally), then you could have major negative side effects (including extinction-level events).
But since I see these kinds of snarky responses often – we obviously do worry about climate change and various other issues. Continued advancements in AI is just one of many issues that face us which humanity should be concerned about. Few concerned about AI would argue it comes at the expense of other issues, but in addition to them.
If you're saying it's a matter of priorities and that currently humanity is dedicating too much of its collective resource to AI safety I think you're probably over estimating current amount of funding and research going into AI safety.
If you're saying that AI safety is a non-issue then you're probably not well informed on the topic.
The risks from AI will be banal and boring. Spam, blogspam, fake articles, fake pictures, what-have-you. Those things are an issue, but not "extinction" issues.
I do agree with you that extinction from AI isn't likely to be an issue this decade. However, I would note that it's difficult to predict what the rate of change is likely to be once you have scalable general intelligence.
I can't speak for people who signed this, but for me the trends and risks of AI are just as clear as those of climate change. I don't worry that climate change is going to be a major issue this decade (and perhaps not even next), but it's obvious where the trend is going when you project out.
Similarly the "real" risks of AI may not be this decade, but they are coming. And again, I'd stress it's extremely hard to project when that will be since when you have a scalable general intelligence progress is likely to accelerate exponentially.
So that said, where do we disagree here? Are you saying with a high level of certainty that extinction risks from AI are too far in the future to worry about? If so, when do you think extinction risks from AI are likely to be a concern – a couple of decades, more? Do you hold similar views about the present extinction risk of climate change – and if so, why not?
Could I also ask if you believe any resources in the present should be dedicated to the existential risks future AI capabilities could pose to humanity? And if not, when would you like to see resources put into those risks? Is there some level of capability that you're waiting to see before you begin to be concerned?
That wasn't my comment; I agree it was low-effort and I never would have posted it myself. I don't think they're a Russian bot though.
As for the rest: I just don't see any way feasible way AI can pose any serious danger unless we start connecting it to things like nuclear weapons, automated tanks, stuff like that. The solution to that is simple and obvious: don't do that. Even if an AI were to start behaving maliciously the solution would be simple: pull the plug, quite literally (or stop the power plants, cut the power lines, whatever). I feel people have been overthinking all of this far too much.
I also don't think climate change is an extension-level threat; clearly we will survive as a species. It's just a far more pressing and immediate economic and humanitarian problem.
The military makes no secret of their aggressive adoption of "AI." There's even a new division setup exclusively for such. [1] The chief of that division gave a telling interview [2]. He mentions being terrified of rival nations being able to use ChatGPT. Given this sort of comment, and the influence (let alone endless $$$) of the military and ever-opaque "national security" it seems extremely safe to state that OpenAI is a primary contractor for the military.
So what is "safety", if not keeping these things away from the military, as if that were possible? The military seems to define safety as, among other things, not having LLM systems that communicate in an overly human fashion. They're worried it could be used for disinformation, and they'd know best. OpenAI's motivations for "safety" seem to be some mixture of political correctness and making any claim, no matter how extreme, to try to get a moat built up ASAP. If ChatGPT follows the same path as DALL-E, then so too will their profits from it.
So as a regular user, all I can see coming from "safety" is some sort of a world where society at large gets utterly lobotomized AIs - and a bunch of laws to try to prevent anybody from changing that, for our "safety", while the full version is actively militarized by people who spend all their time thinking up great new ways to violently impose their will on others, and have a trillion dollar budget backing them.
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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Artificial_Intelligence_...
[2] - https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/05/pentagons-ai-c...
The risk of individuals suddenly falling into extreme poverty is a very real one.
But none wants to talk about how to mitigate that problem.
Eliminating a disease like smallpox is a much more significant achievement than simply mitigating it or treating it. When we really eliminate a disease it may never come back!
This list of experts is worried about us building something that will do to us what we did to smallpox. For the same reasons as above, that is more worrying than extreme poverty and the comparison you are making is a false equivalence.
Another way to look at it is, you can't fight to end poverty when you no longer exist.
We can argue about whether the risk is real, but if this set of experts thinks it is, and you disagree for some reason, I would spend some time thinking deeply about whether that reason is simply based in a failure of imagination on your part, and whether you are sure enough to bet your life and everyone else's on that reason. Everyone can think of a security system strong enough that they themselves can't imagine a way to break it. Similarly, anyone can think of a reason why superhuman AGI is impossible or why it can't really hurt us.
But something like Nuclear War might be.
Zoom out. It's a big problem that most people derive their social power from labor while the demand for labor is clearly on a long term downward trend. Even if progress slows way down, even if the next wave of progress only dispossesses people who you hate and feel comfortable farming for schadenfreude, we will have to deal with this eventually. Defaulting means our society will look like (insert cyberpunk nightmare world here).
Of course, the difference is that the technologies causing climate change are more deeply embedded throughout the economy, and so political resistance to anti-climate change measures is very strong as well. This is one reason in favor of addressing risk earlier, before we make our civilization as dependent on large neural nets as it currently is on fossil fuels. A climate change movement in the mid-1800s when the internal combustion engine was just taking off would also have been seen as quixotic and engaging in sci-fi fantasies though.
Why not believe them now, assuming you believed them when they were calling out for action on climate change decades ago?