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There have been people for a long time who think the world is going to end. We can use your argument to dismiss anyone who fears any existential risk like aster

There have been people for a long time who think the world is going to end. We can use your argument to dismiss anyone who fears any existential risk like asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, AI, etc... And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. I think the risk of human extermination is much lower than many in this group believe because I think AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bound. So I think a hard takeoff is very unlikely. But while the median case for climate change is probably worse than the median case for AI. The existential risks for AI seem much higher. And it's a concern worth taking seriously.

esperent 4y ago
The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online. If they talked about all possible threats to humanity and how to solve them, from AI, to climate change, to nuclear bombs, to asteroids, to disease, they would be an interesting and important group. They don't. They hardly talk about anything else except AI. From the outside it looks a lot like an obsession. Personally I think they treat AI as an existential threat above all others because they consider themselves to be the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe and AI is showing that human intelligence might not be so special after all. So it's an existential threat to their sense of self. Other existential threats merely threaten their lives and are therefore not as important. This would be fine, if acknowledged with a degree of self awareness. But it's not, instead it's wrapped up in so many layers of convoluted logic that most people, insiders and outsiders both, can't see the real reason for this obsession.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  You might want to get familiar with what effective altruism actually focuses on. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism#what-are-some-examples-of-effective-altruism-in-practice https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmmA2Mf5GrY9D6nQD/four-focus-areas-of-effective-altruism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmmA2Mf5GrY9D6nQD/four-focus... https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-2023#donate-to-expertmanaged-funds https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  I think they're worried about it because they honestly do care about existential risk. If you can come up with some more likely existential threats than AI, I'm sure they'll worry about that too.
- yanderekko 4y ago
  >The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety. That's really not true. There's a huge overlap in these groups, but the top EA charities are not shoveling all their money at AI alignment orgs... even if one can argue that they should.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Arguing that AI safety is needed only demonstrates that it's altruistic, but you have a lot farther to go if you want to say funding research in this decade can be effective.
- Natsu 4y ago
  > The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety. How many EA people do you know? That seems to get the most clicks, but I usually associate them with things like mosquito bed nets to help prevent malaria, because that's a far more common topic in my experience. I'm sure you can find particular people who are all about the AI risk stuff that seems pretty wild to me, too. But when you say "focused exclusively" I feel like you may have mostly seen news articles about wild AI stuff and not the average EA enthusiast who spends their time talking about picking efficient charities.
  - aetherson 4y ago
    As someone who is not an EA, but has been peripherally aware of them for years, the bed nets stuff was their big thing until maybe three years ago, but it genuinely is the case that a lot of their energy had recently redirected to AI safety and other X-risks. That isn't to say that the malaria stuff isn't still a big topic, but there has been a shift.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      Givewell is still where most EA money flows and they are almost exclusively focused on mosquito nets and other malaria intervention.
    - bakuninsbart 4y ago
      Yep, I think the community is pretty evenly split amongst "longtermist"-focused people, and this includes all the X-Risk stuff, as well as the more classical "Global Health & Happiness" people. At this point they are actually relatively distinct groups I'd wager. One thing missing from the article is that, at least in my experience, the vast majority of the opportunists are in the longtermist camp. Longtermist topics are the perfect combination of high-prestige and smart sounding with a complete lack of accountability, because the impact of research or projects won't materialize for decades. Ironically, in practice it directly contradicts the founding tenants of EA, despite being a logical conclusion of the underlying moral philosophy.
- arisAlexis 4y ago
  they do. One of the most famous EA books is the precipice and it talks about all existential risks. Also most of the funding gets dispersed.
- consilient 4y ago
  > The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online. Just looking at the topics section of the EA forums (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/all https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/all), we've got - 466 posts in AI safety - 1060 posts in existential risk (seems like a roughly even mix of pandemics, nuclear war, and AI) - 816 posts in global health - 193 posts in animal welfare - 42 posts in biosecurity & pandemics
  - pksebben 4y ago
    didn't really have much of a dog in this fight, but looking at that breakdown I wonder which oil company is bankrolling them. I know I'm jumping the gun just a little, but c'mon. An apocalypse list without climate?
    - dotsam 4y ago
      Climate change is unlikely to kill everyone on earth. Other risks, such as an engineered pandemic, asteroid impact, or an AI apocalypse have the possibility of killing ~everyone. This is not saying that climate change is not a real issue.
      - pksebben 4y ago
        Well, we're past the asteroids, at least. [1] The AIpocalypse seems incredibly unlikely. I'm a lot more worried about the nukes, and even if we end up with robotic overlords, I'd bet they'll be a whole lot better at administration than meat -admins have proven. I'm with you on engineered superviruses. Feasible, likely, and incredibly high impact. What I kind of keep coming back to is the risk profile of all this stuff. That magic vector of likelihood * impact. Global warming is happening now. And it's real bad - worse than I think we give it credit for. What I worry about is that we're the proverbial frog in the pot. Things get just slightly hotter each year, so we'll miss it when we actually boil. 1 https://www.google.com/search?q=double+asteroid+redirection+test https://www.google.com/search?q=double+asteroid+redirection+...
      - 4y ago
- naasking 4y ago
  > They don't. They hardly talk about anything else except AI. Even if that were true, there are lots of people already looking at those other existential risks. The EA crowd was the only group concerned about AI for a long, long time. Seeing an existential risk that nobody else does leads to evangelism and hyper focus so people start paying attention.
- low_tech_love 4y ago
  AI safety and "longtermism" (I feel slightly more stupid just by writing this) is an escape route for the group's realization that (a) they cannot really make a difference and (b) even if they could, it would require a lot of actual work. The person who goes out in the middle of a cold night and cooks soup for homeless people can quite easily count how many mouths he fed; sounds quite effective and quantitative to me. Or maybe the volunteer who is helping fight malaria in a desert somewhere outside of America/Europe; actually, they don't need to count, their exhaustion at the end of a hard day is proof enough of their altruism. But since the real goals of the EAs are not to do any of that (it's just a bunch of socially-awkward geeks looking to feel accepted in some kind of community and find sexual partners; in other words, trying to feel like normal humans), they fooled themselves into believing that such short term actions are "ineffective"; actually, any actual measurable hard work has to necessarily be ineffective, or else it would actually have to be done. So they keep pushing their agenda to longer and longer term issues, more abstract and less well-defined as possible, which cannot be actually measured, so they can continue to build this weird, meaningless, ridiculous fantasy that they live in (and which supports their social hierarchy) without having to actually do anything concrete.
zarzavat 4y ago
> AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bound Any reason to believe this? The human brain runs on 20 watts (!). Obviously biological hardware is not directly comparable to silicon, perhaps silicon is intrinsically less efficient by some factor such that in order to obtain 20W of human brain compute we need to expend K times more in silicon. But is that factor really so large that we are compute-bound? How big would K have to be for us to be compute-bound anyway? If you could have Einstein for 200kW (i.e. silicon is intrinsically 1000x less efficient than brains) would that be compute-bound? It seems much more likely that we are algorithm-bound and simply not using our available compute efficiently.
- pas 4y ago
  So there are many failure modes possible here. Yudkowsky's hard take off mentions "solving protein folding", nanomachines, persuading everyone to let them connect to the internet, infinite adaptability, etc. I think those are unrealistic, but obviously they still have a non-zero chance. More probably bad possibilities are AI-Hitler (monomaniacal populist absolute leader) or AI-Stalin (manipulative, smart, absolutely paranoid, rising through the ranks) ... so something that's human-like enough to be able to connect with humans, to manipulate them, but at the same time less affected by the psychological shortcomings. (Ie. such an AI could spend enough time to cross-interrogate every underling, constantly watch them, etc.) And yes, a very efficient immortal dictator is very bad news, but still bound by human-like limits. And the big infinite dollar question is could this hypothetical AI improve on itself by transcending human limits? Let's say by directly writing programs that it has conscious control over? Can it truly "watch" a 1000 video streams in real-time? Can it increase the number of its input-and-output channels while maintaining its human-like efficiency? Because it's very different to run a fast neural network that spits out a myriad labels for every frame of a video stream (YOLO does this already, but it's not 20W!) and to integrate those labels into actions based on a constantly evolving strategy. Sure maybe the hypothetical AI will simply run a lot of AlphaZero-like hybrid tree-search estimator-evaluator things ... Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that our 20W efficiency comes with getting tried very fast, and using "fast mode" thinking for everything. (Slow mode is the exception, and using it is so rare that we basically pop open a glass of champagne every time.)
paulcole 4y ago
> The existential risks for AI seem much higher What’s the upper bound for climate change’s existential risks? The end of human existence and society as we know it except for a relatively small number of survivors living in a world those of us alive today can barely imagine?
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  There is no realistic scenario provided for by current scientific knowledge that would lead to that outcome. Waterworld was a film, not a textbook.
  - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    The scenario described in this article comes the closest, detailing a mechanism that may have been responsible for the end-Permian mass extinction, wherein warming oceans become anoxic and begin to release huge quantities of hydrogen sulfide gas. The gas is directly lethal to most life in the oceans and on land, and destroys the ozone layer as a bonus. It's hard for me to imagine any way in which an agricultural human civilization could survive that scenario. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/impact-from-the-deep/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/impact-from-the-d...
    - fidgewidge 4y ago
      By "climate change" people mean the sort of change that will be realistically caused by humans within the next few hundred years, not the sort of extinction caused by massive volcano activity that takes 10,000 years and happens once every 100 million years. Obviously if the climate changes drastically enough fast enough then everyone dies but nobody is suggesting that's the case for preset day human activity.
      - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
        In terms of timeline, the key sentence would be "The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm)". The end-Permian was likely around 2500 ppm[1]. It doesn't really matter whether that carbon comes from supervolcanoes or from human emissions. When the article was written, CO2 concentration was 385 ppm. Today it's 421 ppm. If CO2 concentrations were to rise linearly, the timeline for reaching 1,000 ppm would be 250 years. Achieving that would require emissions to stabilize at ~2014 levels. If emissions keep rising, then perhaps it's closer to 150 years. If strong feedbacks kick in, like methane from melting permafrost, then maybe 100 years or less, or maybe we'll reach that happy 2500 ppm mark and see what a real mass-extinction looks like. Of course the ocean has a big thermal mass, so it will probably take quite some time to heat up enough to trigger the disaster even after we reach that level of atmospheric carbon. Hopefully everything will be fine? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22298-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22298-7
freejazz 4y ago
Numbers used to justify ignoring common sense
scotty79 4y ago
> And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. Except at most one.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, and AI. As the old song says "One of these things is not like the other". We know that asteroids exist and many large ones are uncomfortably close to our home. We know that nuclear weapons exist and have seen them used. We know that the climate is getting hotter (*). AI is...well, people losing their shit over ChatGPT (**) aside, AI is not going to be real enough to worry about for a few more decades at least. (*) Anyone who's about to regurgitate some fossil-fuel industry talking points in response, just save your breath. (**) Above note goes double for this.
- JohnPrine 4y ago
  Would you rather we wait until AIs are actually posing a threat for us to study ways to align them with human values? Tons of money already goes into fighting climate change and basically everyone on earth is aware of the threat it poses. The AI safety field is only about a decade old and is relatively unknown. Of course it makes sense to raise awareness there
  - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    > Would you rather we wait until AIs are actually posing a threat for us to study ways to align them with human values? No, I would rather we wait until we are close enough to AI that we are talking about something concrete, rather than making wild speculations.
    - JohnPrine 4y ago
      Interesting. In your opinion, how should we decide when we're close enough that we're talking about something concrete?
      - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
        Please see second asterisked point above.

esperent 4y ago

The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online. If they talked about all possible threats to humanity and how to solve them, from AI, to climate change, to nuclear bombs, to asteroids, to disease, they would be an interesting and important group. They don't. They hardly talk about anything else except AI. From the outside it looks a lot like an obsession. Personally I think they treat AI as an existential threat above all others because they consider themselves to be the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe and AI is showing that human intelligence might not be so special after all. So it's an existential threat to their sense of self. Other existential threats merely threaten their lives and are therefore not as important. This would be fine, if acknowledged with a degree of self awareness. But it's not, instead it's wrapped up in so many layers of convoluted logic that most people, insiders and outsiders both, can't see the real reason for this obsession.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
You might want to get familiar with what effective altruism actually focuses on. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism#what-are-some-examples-of-effective-altruism-in-practice https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmmA2Mf5GrY9D6nQD/four-focus-areas-of-effective-altruism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmmA2Mf5GrY9D6nQD/four-focus... https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-2023#donate-to-expertmanaged-funds https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mitthrowaway2 4y ago
I think they're worried about it because they honestly do care about existential risk. If you can come up with some more likely existential threats than AI, I'm sure they'll worry about that too.
yanderekko 4y ago
>The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety. That's really not true. There's a huge overlap in these groups, but the top EA charities are not shoveling all their money at AI alignment orgs... even if one can argue that they should.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Arguing that AI safety is needed only demonstrates that it's altruistic, but you have a lot farther to go if you want to say funding research in this decade can be effective.
Natsu 4y ago
> The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety. How many EA people do you know? That seems to get the most clicks, but I usually associate them with things like mosquito bed nets to help prevent malaria, because that's a far more common topic in my experience. I'm sure you can find particular people who are all about the AI risk stuff that seems pretty wild to me, too. But when you say "focused exclusively" I feel like you may have mostly seen news articles about wild AI stuff and not the average EA enthusiast who spends their time talking about picking efficient charities.
- aetherson 4y ago
  As someone who is not an EA, but has been peripherally aware of them for years, the bed nets stuff was their big thing until maybe three years ago, but it genuinely is the case that a lot of their energy had recently redirected to AI safety and other X-risks. That isn't to say that the malaria stuff isn't still a big topic, but there has been a shift.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Givewell is still where most EA money flows and they are almost exclusively focused on mosquito nets and other malaria intervention.
  - bakuninsbart 4y ago
    Yep, I think the community is pretty evenly split amongst "longtermist"-focused people, and this includes all the X-Risk stuff, as well as the more classical "Global Health & Happiness" people. At this point they are actually relatively distinct groups I'd wager. One thing missing from the article is that, at least in my experience, the vast majority of the opportunists are in the longtermist camp. Longtermist topics are the perfect combination of high-prestige and smart sounding with a complete lack of accountability, because the impact of research or projects won't materialize for decades. Ironically, in practice it directly contradicts the founding tenants of EA, despite being a logical conclusion of the underlying moral philosophy.
arisAlexis 4y ago
they do. One of the most famous EA books is the precipice and it talks about all existential risks. Also most of the funding gets dispersed.
consilient 4y ago
> The issue is that the effective altruism crowd are focused exclusively on AI safety, at least in what they publish online. Just looking at the topics section of the EA forums (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/all https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/all), we've got - 466 posts in AI safety - 1060 posts in existential risk (seems like a roughly even mix of pandemics, nuclear war, and AI) - 816 posts in global health - 193 posts in animal welfare - 42 posts in biosecurity & pandemics
- pksebben 4y ago
  didn't really have much of a dog in this fight, but looking at that breakdown I wonder which oil company is bankrolling them. I know I'm jumping the gun just a little, but c'mon. An apocalypse list without climate?
  - dotsam 4y ago
    Climate change is unlikely to kill everyone on earth. Other risks, such as an engineered pandemic, asteroid impact, or an AI apocalypse have the possibility of killing ~everyone. This is not saying that climate change is not a real issue.
    - pksebben 4y ago
      Well, we're past the asteroids, at least. [1] The AIpocalypse seems incredibly unlikely. I'm a lot more worried about the nukes, and even if we end up with robotic overlords, I'd bet they'll be a whole lot better at administration than meat -admins have proven. I'm with you on engineered superviruses. Feasible, likely, and incredibly high impact. What I kind of keep coming back to is the risk profile of all this stuff. That magic vector of likelihood * impact. Global warming is happening now. And it's real bad - worse than I think we give it credit for. What I worry about is that we're the proverbial frog in the pot. Things get just slightly hotter each year, so we'll miss it when we actually boil. 1 https://www.google.com/search?q=double+asteroid+redirection+test https://www.google.com/search?q=double+asteroid+redirection+...
    - 4y ago
naasking 4y ago
> They don't. They hardly talk about anything else except AI. Even if that were true, there are lots of people already looking at those other existential risks. The EA crowd was the only group concerned about AI for a long, long time. Seeing an existential risk that nobody else does leads to evangelism and hyper focus so people start paying attention.
low_tech_love 4y ago
AI safety and "longtermism" (I feel slightly more stupid just by writing this) is an escape route for the group's realization that (a) they cannot really make a difference and (b) even if they could, it would require a lot of actual work. The person who goes out in the middle of a cold night and cooks soup for homeless people can quite easily count how many mouths he fed; sounds quite effective and quantitative to me. Or maybe the volunteer who is helping fight malaria in a desert somewhere outside of America/Europe; actually, they don't need to count, their exhaustion at the end of a hard day is proof enough of their altruism. But since the real goals of the EAs are not to do any of that (it's just a bunch of socially-awkward geeks looking to feel accepted in some kind of community and find sexual partners; in other words, trying to feel like normal humans), they fooled themselves into believing that such short term actions are "ineffective"; actually, any actual measurable hard work has to necessarily be ineffective, or else it would actually have to be done. So they keep pushing their agenda to longer and longer term issues, more abstract and less well-defined as possible, which cannot be actually measured, so they can continue to build this weird, meaningless, ridiculous fantasy that they live in (and which supports their social hierarchy) without having to actually do anything concrete.

zarzavat 4y ago

> AI is much more compute bound than algorithm bound Any reason to believe this? The human brain runs on 20 watts (!). Obviously biological hardware is not directly comparable to silicon, perhaps silicon is intrinsically less efficient by some factor such that in order to obtain 20W of human brain compute we need to expend K times more in silicon. But is that factor really so large that we are compute-bound? How big would K have to be for us to be compute-bound anyway? If you could have Einstein for 200kW (i.e. silicon is intrinsically 1000x less efficient than brains) would that be compute-bound? It seems much more likely that we are algorithm-bound and simply not using our available compute efficiently.

pas 4y ago
So there are many failure modes possible here. Yudkowsky's hard take off mentions "solving protein folding", nanomachines, persuading everyone to let them connect to the internet, infinite adaptability, etc. I think those are unrealistic, but obviously they still have a non-zero chance. More probably bad possibilities are AI-Hitler (monomaniacal populist absolute leader) or AI-Stalin (manipulative, smart, absolutely paranoid, rising through the ranks) ... so something that's human-like enough to be able to connect with humans, to manipulate them, but at the same time less affected by the psychological shortcomings. (Ie. such an AI could spend enough time to cross-interrogate every underling, constantly watch them, etc.) And yes, a very efficient immortal dictator is very bad news, but still bound by human-like limits. And the big infinite dollar question is could this hypothetical AI improve on itself by transcending human limits? Let's say by directly writing programs that it has conscious control over? Can it truly "watch" a 1000 video streams in real-time? Can it increase the number of its input-and-output channels while maintaining its human-like efficiency? Because it's very different to run a fast neural network that spits out a myriad labels for every frame of a video stream (YOLO does this already, but it's not 20W!) and to integrate those labels into actions based on a constantly evolving strategy. Sure maybe the hypothetical AI will simply run a lot of AlphaZero-like hybrid tree-search estimator-evaluator things ... Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that our 20W efficiency comes with getting tried very fast, and using "fast mode" thinking for everything. (Slow mode is the exception, and using it is so rare that we basically pop open a glass of champagne every time.)

paulcole 4y ago

> The existential risks for AI seem much higher What’s the upper bound for climate change’s existential risks? The end of human existence and society as we know it except for a relatively small number of survivors living in a world those of us alive today can barely imagine?

fidgewidge 4y ago
There is no realistic scenario provided for by current scientific knowledge that would lead to that outcome. Waterworld was a film, not a textbook.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  The scenario described in this article comes the closest, detailing a mechanism that may have been responsible for the end-Permian mass extinction, wherein warming oceans become anoxic and begin to release huge quantities of hydrogen sulfide gas. The gas is directly lethal to most life in the oceans and on land, and destroys the ozone layer as a bonus. It's hard for me to imagine any way in which an agricultural human civilization could survive that scenario. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/impact-from-the-deep/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/impact-from-the-d...
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    By "climate change" people mean the sort of change that will be realistically caused by humans within the next few hundred years, not the sort of extinction caused by massive volcano activity that takes 10,000 years and happens once every 100 million years. Obviously if the climate changes drastically enough fast enough then everyone dies but nobody is suggesting that's the case for preset day human activity.
    - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
      In terms of timeline, the key sentence would be "The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm)". The end-Permian was likely around 2500 ppm[1]. It doesn't really matter whether that carbon comes from supervolcanoes or from human emissions. When the article was written, CO2 concentration was 385 ppm. Today it's 421 ppm. If CO2 concentrations were to rise linearly, the timeline for reaching 1,000 ppm would be 250 years. Achieving that would require emissions to stabilize at ~2014 levels. If emissions keep rising, then perhaps it's closer to 150 years. If strong feedbacks kick in, like methane from melting permafrost, then maybe 100 years or less, or maybe we'll reach that happy 2500 ppm mark and see what a real mass-extinction looks like. Of course the ocean has a big thermal mass, so it will probably take quite some time to heat up enough to trigger the disaster even after we reach that level of atmospheric carbon. Hopefully everything will be fine? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22298-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22298-7

freejazz 4y ago

Numbers used to justify ignoring common sense

scotty79 4y ago

> And since the world exists every group will be wrong except one. Except at most one.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

Asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, and AI. As the old song says "One of these things is not like the other". We know that asteroids exist and many large ones are uncomfortably close to our home. We know that nuclear weapons exist and have seen them used. We know that the climate is getting hotter (*). AI is...well, people losing their shit over ChatGPT (**) aside, AI is not going to be real enough to worry about for a few more decades at least. (*) Anyone who's about to regurgitate some fossil-fuel industry talking points in response, just save your breath. (**) Above note goes double for this.

JohnPrine 4y ago
Would you rather we wait until AIs are actually posing a threat for us to study ways to align them with human values? Tons of money already goes into fighting climate change and basically everyone on earth is aware of the threat it poses. The AI safety field is only about a decade old and is relatively unknown. Of course it makes sense to raise awareness there
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  > Would you rather we wait until AIs are actually posing a threat for us to study ways to align them with human values? No, I would rather we wait until we are close enough to AI that we are talking about something concrete, rather than making wild speculations.
  - JohnPrine 4y ago
    Interesting. In your opinion, how should we decide when we're close enough that we're talking about something concrete?
    - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
      Please see second asterisked point above.