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by cjbprime 3171 days ago
There should be a word for this phenomenon where organizations are created to ameliorate a perceived risk, and then they do work that is unequivocally directly massively increasing that risk while writing articles that say that they feel kind of bad about the risk. o_O

I'm not very worried about AI safety. But if I was, it'd be hard to think of groups like OpenAI as working on the same side.

5 comments

Personally, I'd rather have the people working on AI be the ones who are aware of the potential theoretical pitfalls, rather than someone who is not aware of any pitfalls and rushes full steam ahead.
Yes. We are irrational in rearing and educating human children for example.

Sandboxing. Is it like this?

http://www.ptaugustacsc.sa.edu.au/images/sandpit.jpg

Or like this?

https://s3.amazonaws.com/audreywatters/factory_counting.jpg

Yet such things are done by apparently good and nice people trying to work in the best interests of humanity. So how can we expect to somehow get it right in the case of an AGI without turning him into a resentful demon?

> But if I was, it'd be hard to think of groups like OpenAI as working on the same side.

How so?

Because I would think that they're currently making unsafe AI more likely rather than less likely, contradicting their stated goal.
How so? What should they do differently?
http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-sa...

Personally, I think making AI tech broadly available could be a bad idea if AI tech changes warfare so that offense works better than defense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10721621 (This is already true, but I think it's likely that further technological development will make it even more true.)

"Corporate demagoguery"
It's honestly an impossible goal to make AGI safe for humans.

If an AGI cannot be independent in it's goals, meaning it could potentially harm humans, then it's not really AGI.