any new professors of AI will to some degree be selected for not caring about AI risk, which was not the case when Russell or Bengio entered the field.
I agree that this is a concern that hypothetically could make a difference, but as I said in my other comment, we are likely to alienate many of the best people by doing means-end-reasoning like this (including people like Stuart and Yoshua), and also, this seems like a very slow process that would take decades to have a large effect, and my timelines are not that long.
Seems like we mostly agree and our difference is based on timelines. I agree the effect is more of a long term one, although I wouldn’t say decades. OpenAI was founded in 2015 and raised the profile of AI risk in 2022, so in the counterfactual case where Sam Altman was dissuaded from founding OpenAI due to timeline concerns, AI risk would have much lower public credibility less than a decade.
Public recognition as a researcher does seem to favour longer periods of time though, the biggest names are all people who’ve been in the field multiple decades, so you have a point there.
I agree that this is a concern that hypothetically could make a difference, but as I said in my other comment, we are likely to alienate many of the best people by doing means-end-reasoning like this (including people like Stuart and Yoshua), and also, this seems like a very slow process that would take decades to have a large effect, and my timelines are not that long.
Seems like we mostly agree and our difference is based on timelines. I agree the effect is more of a long term one, although I wouldn’t say decades. OpenAI was founded in 2015 and raised the profile of AI risk in 2022, so in the counterfactual case where Sam Altman was dissuaded from founding OpenAI due to timeline concerns, AI risk would have much lower public credibility less than a decade.
Public recognition as a researcher does seem to favour longer periods of time though, the biggest names are all people who’ve been in the field multiple decades, so you have a point there.