"In the last few months, there has been this increasing so-called rift between the AI ethics and AI safety communities. There is a lot of talk about how this is an academic rift that needs to be resolved, how these communities are basically aiming for the same purpose. I think the thing that annoys me most about the discourse around this is that people don’t recognize this as a power struggle.
It is not really about intellectual merit of these ideas. Of course, there are lots of bad intellectual and academic claims that have been made on both sides. But that isn’t what this is really about. It’s about who gets funding, which concerns are prioritized. So looking at it as if it is like a clash of individuals or a clash of personalities just really undersells the whole thing, makes it sound like people are out there bickering, whereas in fact, it’s about something much deeper."