An excellent question and one I sympathize with. While it is true that reasonable public statements have been coordinated and gotten widespread coverage, in general the community has been scrambling to explain different aspects of the AI safety/risk case in a way that diverse groups would understand. Largely, to have it all in one place, in an accessible manner (instead of spread across fora and blog posts and podcasts).
I think it was an underestimation of timelines and a related underfunding of efforts. I started working on a non-technical AI safety book last June and I also think I underestimated timelines. I hope to have the book out in October because it is urgent but it sure would have been better if I started earlier.
Given the stakes of all the things we say we care about, I think a large donor should have spent up to $1M several years ago to support the writing of 5-10 accessible books on AI safety, Bio risk, etc (at least 2 per topic), so there would be something on hand that could a) be discussed, b) be distributed, and c) be drawn from for other comms materials.
Largely, to have it all in one place, in an accessible manner (instead of spread across fora and blog posts and podcasts
This is exactly what Catastrophic Risks of AI is doing. I think this is already a very good and accessible resource for a wide audience of reasonably intelligent people (maybe people who wouldn’t get it also won’t read any books whatsoever).
An excellent question and one I sympathize with. While it is true that reasonable public statements have been coordinated and gotten widespread coverage, in general the community has been scrambling to explain different aspects of the AI safety/risk case in a way that diverse groups would understand. Largely, to have it all in one place, in an accessible manner (instead of spread across fora and blog posts and podcasts).
I think it was an underestimation of timelines and a related underfunding of efforts. I started working on a non-technical AI safety book last June and I also think I underestimated timelines. I hope to have the book out in October because it is urgent but it sure would have been better if I started earlier.
Given the stakes of all the things we say we care about, I think a large donor should have spent up to $1M several years ago to support the writing of 5-10 accessible books on AI safety, Bio risk, etc (at least 2 per topic), so there would be something on hand that could a) be discussed, b) be distributed, and c) be drawn from for other comms materials.
This is probably still a good idea.
This is exactly what Catastrophic Risks of AI is doing. I think this is already a very good and accessible resource for a wide audience of reasonably intelligent people (maybe people who wouldn’t get it also won’t read any books whatsoever).