I’m worried that much or most of the risk we’re facing over the next 100 or so years come from technologies that are not even on our radar. We do not seem to have a great track record for predicting which advancements are coming, and we seem to be at least as bad at predicting how they will be used or which further advancements they will enable. It seems likely to me that AI will make discovery faster and possibly cheaper.
It makes sense to me that we focus on problems that are already on our radar (AI alignment, synthetic biology), and some of our efforts to mitigate those risks might transfer to whatever else we find ourselves up against. And some people do seem to be worried about risks from emerging tech in a very broad sense (Bostrom and others at FHI come to mind). But I’m not sure we’re taking seriously enough the problem of dealing with entirely unforeseen technological risks.
On the other hand, to my knowledge, we haven’t thought of any important new technological risks in the past few decades, which is evidence against many such risks existing.
I’m worried that much or most of the risk we’re facing over the next 100 or so years come from technologies that are not even on our radar. We do not seem to have a great track record for predicting which advancements are coming, and we seem to be at least as bad at predicting how they will be used or which further advancements they will enable. It seems likely to me that AI will make discovery faster and possibly cheaper.
It makes sense to me that we focus on problems that are already on our radar (AI alignment, synthetic biology), and some of our efforts to mitigate those risks might transfer to whatever else we find ourselves up against. And some people do seem to be worried about risks from emerging tech in a very broad sense (Bostrom and others at FHI come to mind). But I’m not sure we’re taking seriously enough the problem of dealing with entirely unforeseen technological risks.
On the other hand, to my knowledge, we haven’t thought of any important new technological risks in the past few decades, which is evidence against many such risks existing.