[agucova]

I find this kind of dismissive attitude annoying.

There are good arguments in the literature for why you might want to care about these risks [1, 2], and I think there's lots of room for reasonable disagreement about whether these are arguments are any good, but pretending the entire field of AI Safety is just delusional is just bad faith at this point. Especially when companies like OpenAI, Anthropic or GDM were explicitly created to build AGI, and have been talking about these risks since they were first founded.

[1]: An introductory paper I like is The Alignment Problem for a Deep Learning Perspective, from Ngo et al, https://openreview.net/forum?id=fh8EYKFKns.

[2]: A broader, less technical introduction to AI Safety that I like is Hendricks et al's An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks, https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12001

[gfourfour]

> This paper provides an overview of the main sources of catastrophic AI risks, which we organize into four categories: malicious use, in which individuals or groups intentionally use AIs to cause harm; AI race, in which competitive environments compel actors to deploy unsafe AIs or cede control to AIs; organizational risks, highlighting how human factors and complex systems can increase the chances of catastrophic accidents; and rogue AIs, describing the inherent difficulty in controlling agents far more intelligent than humans.

The first three risks are completely reasonable and people should be thinking about them. No, ChatGPT should not be diagnosing patients and giving them medicine. Yes, we should be vigilant to a flood of disinformation and revenge porn made possible by AI generated content.

But when people talk about “AI safety” in this context, it’s usually in reference to the fourth category, planning for a superintelligent malicious AI that evades detection, self-replicates, etc. That’s pure science fiction at that point, and it’s not a reason to slow down development of LLMs, which yes are basically glorified chatbots and will not lead to “AGI” in this threatening sense.

If I recall correctly, when steam engines started being able to go 40-50 MPH, there were people who were concerned that human beings would not be able to survive travel at such speeds because we never had experienced them. This wasn’t completely irrational, I suppose, as there are speed-induced G forces that are fatal, and they had no way of knowing the threshold back then. But once it was clear that steam locomotives weren’t in any danger of putting us over that threshold, incessant worry about locomotive-induced speeds death was kooky. “Locomotive safety” involving derailment mitigation, track crossing markings, etc. - still legitimate. But if “locomotive safety” was associated with people making claims like “we’re headed for a mass casualty event when the first locomotive hits 60 mph,” then “locomotive safety” would be marginalized.

It doesn’t help that the public faces of “AI safety” include autodidactic pseudointellectuals, clearly mentally unwell people, and philosophers too deep in their own “taken to its logical conclusion…” thought experiments.