I really like your examples in this post, and it made me think of a tangential but ultimately related issue.
I feel like there’s long been something like two camps in the AI safety space: the people who think it’s very hard to make AI safe and the people who think it’s very very hard like threading a needle from 10 miles away using hand-made binoculars and a long stick (yes, there’s a third camp that thinks it will be easy, but they aren’t really in the AI safety conversation due to selection effects). And I suspect some of this difference is in how much purposed example failure scenarios feel likely and realistic to them. Being myself in the latter camp, I sometimes find I hard to articulate why I think this, and often want better, more evocative examples. Thus I was happy to read your examples because I think they achieve a level of evocativeness that I at least often find hard to create.
I really like your examples in this post, and it made me think of a tangential but ultimately related issue.
I feel like there’s long been something like two camps in the AI safety space: the people who think it’s very hard to make AI safe and the people who think it’s very very hard like threading a needle from 10 miles away using hand-made binoculars and a long stick (yes, there’s a third camp that thinks it will be easy, but they aren’t really in the AI safety conversation due to selection effects). And I suspect some of this difference is in how much purposed example failure scenarios feel likely and realistic to them. Being myself in the latter camp, I sometimes find I hard to articulate why I think this, and often want better, more evocative examples. Thus I was happy to read your examples because I think they achieve a level of evocativeness that I at least often find hard to create.