Like everyone, AI safety has been on my mind a lot lately. I was thinking about how most problems that are caused by intelligence in the world to-date seem to have always be solved by or have the potential to be soluble using more intelligence.
While some problems can be massively lethal of course, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the problems that most applied AI safety today seeks to avoid. Rather, the prevalent approach seems to be safety by avoiding even small risks—like not letting a child play for fear it might scratch its knee. In taking this approach, it feels like we’ll almost certainly limit our ability to access and leverage this intelligence to solve many problems.
I was curious are there many good examples from the real-world where this hasn’t been the case in other areas—what are meaningful problems that were caused by intelligence, that couldn’t be solved with more intelligence? Even if that wasn’t necessarily done—for economic reasons, etc.
For example, intelligence caused carbon emissions - we leveraged it to create such huge levels of industry that we emitted far too much—but intelligence will also almost-certainly be leveraged to solve it—via a variety of human-invented solutions and counter-actions.
Are there examples where this wasn’t the case historically?
[Question] What are examples of problems that were caused by intelligence, that couldn’t be solved with intelligence?
Like everyone, AI safety has been on my mind a lot lately. I was thinking about how most problems that are caused by intelligence in the world to-date seem to have always be solved by or have the potential to be soluble using more intelligence.
While some problems can be massively lethal of course, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the problems that most applied AI safety today seeks to avoid. Rather, the prevalent approach seems to be safety by avoiding even small risks—like not letting a child play for fear it might scratch its knee. In taking this approach, it feels like we’ll almost certainly limit our ability to access and leverage this intelligence to solve many problems.
I was curious are there many good examples from the real-world where this hasn’t been the case in other areas—what are meaningful problems that were caused by intelligence, that couldn’t be solved with more intelligence? Even if that wasn’t necessarily done—for economic reasons, etc.
For example, intelligence caused carbon emissions - we leveraged it to create such huge levels of industry that we emitted far too much—but intelligence will also almost-certainly be leveraged to solve it—via a variety of human-invented solutions and counter-actions.
Are there examples where this wasn’t the case historically?