This was a very interesting read. Aside from just illuminating history and how people used to think differently, I think this story has a lot of implications for policy questions today.
The go-to suggestions for pretty much any structural ill in the world today is to “raise awareness” and “appoint someone”. These two things often make the problem worse. “Raising awareness” mostly acts to give activists moral license to do nothing practical about the problem, and can even backfire by making the problem a political issue. For example, a campaign to raise awareness of HPV vaccines in Texas lowered the numbered of teenage girls getting the vaccine because it made the vaccine a signal of affiliation with the Democrat party. Appointing a “dealing with problem X officer” often means creating an office of people who work tirelessly to perpetuate problem X, lest they lose their livelihood.
So what was different with factory safety? This post does a good job highlighting the two main points: • The problem was actually solvable • The people who could actually solve it were given a direct financial incentive to solve it
This is a good model to keep in mind both for optimistic activists who believe in top down reforms, and for cynical economists and public choice theorists. Now how can we apply it to AI safety?
Note that “raising awareness” was actually an important part of the factory safety story. It can be useful if it is channeled into actual solutions (and, to your point about the HPV vaccines, if there isn’t too much political tribalism going on such that any issue immediately becomes polarized).
This was a very interesting read. Aside from just illuminating history and how people used to think differently, I think this story has a lot of implications for policy questions today.
The go-to suggestions for pretty much any structural ill in the world today is to “raise awareness” and “appoint someone”. These two things often make the problem worse. “Raising awareness” mostly acts to give activists moral license to do nothing practical about the problem, and can even backfire by making the problem a political issue. For example, a campaign to raise awareness of HPV vaccines in Texas lowered the numbered of teenage girls getting the vaccine because it made the vaccine a signal of affiliation with the Democrat party. Appointing a “dealing with problem X officer” often means creating an office of people who work tirelessly to perpetuate problem X, lest they lose their livelihood.
So what was different with factory safety? This post does a good job highlighting the two main points:
• The problem was actually solvable
• The people who could actually solve it were given a direct financial incentive to solve it
This is a good model to keep in mind both for optimistic activists who believe in top down reforms, and for cynical economists and public choice theorists. Now how can we apply it to AI safety?
Note that “raising awareness” was actually an important part of the factory safety story. It can be useful if it is channeled into actual solutions (and, to your point about the HPV vaccines, if there isn’t too much political tribalism going on such that any issue immediately becomes polarized).