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Reminds me of the parody in Scott Alexander's article "If the media reported on other things like it does EA" > Some epidemiologists are worrying that a new vi

Reminds me of the parody in Scott Alexander's article "If the media reported on other things like it does EA" > Some epidemiologists are worrying that a new virus from Wuhan could become a wider catastrophe. Their message is infecting people around the world with fear and xenophobia, spreading faster than any plague. Perhaps they should consider that in some sense, they themselves are the global pandemic. Like, yeah, people did consider that idea, and the "corporations are the real unaligned AI" idea, and the "capitalism is the real extinction risk" idea, and all the pseudo-clever variations of the concept. The problem is that "understanding that capitalism has problems" isn't equivalent to "having an actionable plan to solve capitalism".

walleeee 4y ago
> The problem is that "understanding that capitalism has problems" isn't equivalent to "having an actionable plan to solve capitalism This is a caricature and the same thing could be said of AI x-risk. There are plenty of ideas on how to avoid unwanted effects of economic systems. I don't think it's at all clear that it's a single problem with a single solution. Getting ideas into practice tends to be the tougher challenge. More broadly, the point is not to say "wow, alignment problems have existed for a long time already!" This is not profound or clever, it's obvious. But there's a big group of people considering a narrow definition of the problem, and playing what could be considered a useful social role.