I think a lot of people in AI safety don’t think it has a high probability of working (in the sense that the existence of the field caused an aligned AGI to exist where there otherwise wouldn’t have been one) - if it turns out that AI alignment is easy and happens by default if people put even a little bit of thought into it, or it’s incredibly difficult and nothing short of a massive civilizational effort could save us, then probably the field will end up being useless. But even a 0.1% chance of counterfactually causing aligned AI would be extremely worthwhile!
Theory of change seems like something that varies a lot across different pieces of the field; e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writing about why MIRI’s approach to alignment is important seems very different from Chris Olah’s discussion of the future of interpretability. It’s definitely an important thing to ask for a given project, but I’m not sure there’s a good monolithic answer for everyone working on AI alignment problems.
I think a lot of people in AI safety don’t think it has a high probability of working (in the sense that the existence of the field caused an aligned AGI to exist where there otherwise wouldn’t have been one) - if it turns out that AI alignment is easy and happens by default if people put even a little bit of thought into it, or it’s incredibly difficult and nothing short of a massive civilizational effort could save us, then probably the field will end up being useless. But even a 0.1% chance of counterfactually causing aligned AI would be extremely worthwhile!
Theory of change seems like something that varies a lot across different pieces of the field; e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writing about why MIRI’s approach to alignment is important seems very different from Chris Olah’s discussion of the future of interpretability. It’s definitely an important thing to ask for a given project, but I’m not sure there’s a good monolithic answer for everyone working on AI alignment problems.