[pessimizer]

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.

I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy."

If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fired and it made the papers. She has a BA and MA in electrical engineering, and her father was also an electrical engineer. After that, she went on to a PhD in computer vision with Fei-Fei Li (Imagenet) as her advisor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Early_life_and_ed...

I guarantee you she knows how to rename a file in Linux.

If, instead, you were referring to "safety" specifically, I'd like to understand how you're making the distinction.

edit:

> Gebru joined Apple as an intern while at Stanford, working in their hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year. Of her work as an audio engineer, her manager told Wired she was "fearless", and well-liked by her colleagues. During her tenure at Apple, Gebru became more interested in building software, namely computer vision that could detect human figures. She went on to develop signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. At the time, she said she did not consider the potential use for surveillance, saying "I just found it technically interesting."

[qcnguy]

Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google. She wrote stuff about doing social good, wrote the silly stochastic parrots paper that argued AI research was a waste of time, and whose title was proven false immediately (LLMs aren't parrots). The closest she got to "safety" was complaining that AI researchers weren't concerned enough that LLMs might say things Gebru didn't personally like.

Serious safety researchers are doing stuff like understanding neural circuits. Very different.

She surely knows how to use Linux. But she isn't really a safety researcher.

[ben_w]

> Serious safety researchers are doing stuff like understanding neural circuits. Very different.

There's a very broad range of unsolved safety issues in AI, and what she does is perfectly validly in that category even though she herself will deny the value of anything in the general category of "TESCREAL".

It's like how computer science safety can be anything and everything from "Should platforms like Meta be required to have a minimum age requirement?" and "Should section 230 provides immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by its users?", but also "How can we formalise system testing requirements to prove that things like Therac-25 never happens again?" and "Is the Boeing 737 MAX flight control software actually safe?"

[qcnguy]

I wouldn't describe the first two as computer science safety arguments. Those are purely social and merely the latest iteration of exactly the same debate that occurred around VHS tapes, newspapers, etc. The latter two are very specific to computing.

[ben_w]

230 is something that couldn't have existed with newspapers, because for "letters to the editor" it's obvious both who the editor is and that this is the opinion of some named public person whose opinion they were willing to reproduce. There may have been such an argument about telephones back in the day, but those are so old now…

Anyway, point is that AI does something new besides "is software" in the same way that computers do something new besides "is electrical" — social implications of ${new_tool} is absolutely relevant to all discussions about ${safety|new_tool}. Don't need to invent motor vehicle licenses or motor vehicles safety requirements or traffic lights before the invention of cars.

Edit: or to put it another way, "yes, and?" — they're still about safety of ${thing}, just a question of what level to improve that safety.

[overfeed]

> Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google

Wouldn't you find it strange for a co-lead of an Ethical AI team to not to do any AI safety work? I realize the AI Doomer vs AI Zoomer is a culture-war with a veneer or technical jargon, but I hope we can at least agree on the basic tenets of our shared reality even as we draw wildly different conclusions.

[qcnguy]

Not really. Ethics asks, "is this good?". Safety asks, "how do we make this safe?" - very different questions.