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Comment by NinjaTrance | Hacker News Reader

Interesting reading.

They are still focusing on "catastrophic risks" related to chemical and biological weapons production; or misaligned models wreaking havoc.

But they are not addressing the elephant in the room:

* Political risks, such as dictators using AI to implement opressive bureaucracy. * Socio-economic risks, such as mass unemployement.

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Yeah this has always been the glaring blind spot for most of the "AI Safety" community; and most of the proposals for "improving" AI safety actually make these risks far worse and far more likely.

It makes quite a lot of sense to focus on reducing the risks of every human everywhere dying, rather than the risks of already existing oppression getting worse.

No, you are deeply misunderstanding the issue. Creating a rivalrous good that powers fight over for control, then use violence to maintain control of, creating a global feudalism, is not "existing oppression getting worse". It actually makes the risks of every human everywhere dying far higher, and even if that doesn't happen, decreases global utility by a similar percentage (99%, instead of 100%). It could actually be worse, if average human utility becomes negative.

I'm getting flashbacks to the 2018 hit:

    This is extremely dangerous to our democracy

We evolved to share information through text and media, and with the advent of printing and now the internet, we often derive our feelings of consensus and sureness from the preponderance of information that used to take more effort to produce. Now we're now at a point where a disproportionately small input can produce a massively proliferated, coherent-enough output, that can give the appearance of consensus, and I'm not sure how we are going to deal with that.

This could have been written almost verbatim after the printing press came out and printed pamphlets became ubiquitous.

> * Political risks, such as dictators using AI to implement opressive bureaucracy. * Socio-economic risks, such as mass unemployement.

Even Haiku would score 90% on that.

> Political risks, such as dictators using AI to implement opressive bureaucracy.

I think we're pretty good at that without AI.

It’s because that would be fairly speculative and cannot be measured. I don’t think that’s something that would make much sense in a system card. But Anthropic leadership does seem to communicate on that topic: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...

The unemployment rate in the US is whatever the Fed wants it to be, and isn't a function of available technology.

They don’t care about those risks, because they’re unsolvable and would mean they wouldn’t make money/gain power.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic discusses all those risks in this essay: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...

He seems to care quite a lot?

Not enough to not do it, though. Actions, not words, and the actions are simple: they're building this while promising to wipe out entire industries.

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