Policymakers and people in industry, at least till ChatGPT had no idea what was going on (e.g at the AI World Summit, 2 months ago very few people even knew about GPT-3). SOTA large language models are not really properly deployed, so nobody cared about them or even knew about them (till ChatGPT at least).
As you point out yourself, what makes people interested in developing AGI is progress in AI, not the public discussion of potential dangers. “Nobody cared about” LLMs is certainly not true—I’m pretty sure the relevant people watched them closely. That many people aren’t concerned about AGI or doubting its feasibility by now only means that THOSE people will not pursue it, and any public discussion will probably not change their minds. There are others who think very differently, like the people at OpenAI, Deepmind, Google, and (I suspect) a lot of others who communicate less openly about what they do.
I agree that [a common understanding of the dangers] would be something good to have. But the question is: is it even possible to have such a thing?
I think that within the scientific community, it’s roughly possible (but then your book/outreach medium must be highly targeted towards that community). Within the general public, I think that it’s ~impossible.
I don’t think you can easily separate the scientific community from the general public. Even scientific papers are read by journalists, who often publish about them in a simplified or distorted way. Already there are many alarming posts and articles out there, as well as books like Stuart Russell’s “Human Compatible” (which I think is very good and helpful), so keeping the lid on the possibility of AGI and its profound impacts is way too late (it was probably too late already when Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001 - A Space Odyssey”). Not talking about the dangers of uncontrollable AI for fear that this may lead to certain actors investing even more heavily in the field is both naive and counterproductive in my view.
And I would strongly recommend not publishing your book as long as you haven’t done that.
I will definitely publish it, but I doubt very much that it will have a large impact. There are many other writers out there with a much larger audience who write similar books.
I also hope that a lot of people who have thought about these issues have proofread your book because it’s the kind of thing that could really increase P(doom) substantially.
I’m currently in the process of translating it to English so I can do just that. I’ll send you a link as soon as I’m finished. I’ll also invite everyone else in the AI safety community (I’m probably going to post an invite on LessWrong).
Concerning the Putin quote, I don’t think that Russia is at the forefront of development, but China certainly is. Xi has said similar things in public, and I doubt very much that we know how much they currently spend on training their AIs. The quotes are not relevant, though, I just mentioned them to make the point that there is already a lot of discussion about the enormous impact AI will have on our future. I really can’t see how discussing the risks should be damaging, while discussing the great potential of AGI for humanity should not.
As you point out yourself, what makes people interested in developing AGI is progress in AI, not the public discussion of potential dangers. “Nobody cared about” LLMs is certainly not true—I’m pretty sure the relevant people watched them closely. That many people aren’t concerned about AGI or doubting its feasibility by now only means that THOSE people will not pursue it, and any public discussion will probably not change their minds. There are others who think very differently, like the people at OpenAI, Deepmind, Google, and (I suspect) a lot of others who communicate less openly about what they do.
I don’t think you can easily separate the scientific community from the general public. Even scientific papers are read by journalists, who often publish about them in a simplified or distorted way. Already there are many alarming posts and articles out there, as well as books like Stuart Russell’s “Human Compatible” (which I think is very good and helpful), so keeping the lid on the possibility of AGI and its profound impacts is way too late (it was probably too late already when Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001 - A Space Odyssey”). Not talking about the dangers of uncontrollable AI for fear that this may lead to certain actors investing even more heavily in the field is both naive and counterproductive in my view.
I will definitely publish it, but I doubt very much that it will have a large impact. There are many other writers out there with a much larger audience who write similar books.
I’m currently in the process of translating it to English so I can do just that. I’ll send you a link as soon as I’m finished. I’ll also invite everyone else in the AI safety community (I’m probably going to post an invite on LessWrong).
Concerning the Putin quote, I don’t think that Russia is at the forefront of development, but China certainly is. Xi has said similar things in public, and I doubt very much that we know how much they currently spend on training their AIs. The quotes are not relevant, though, I just mentioned them to make the point that there is already a lot of discussion about the enormous impact AI will have on our future. I really can’t see how discussing the risks should be damaging, while discussing the great potential of AGI for humanity should not.