While the previous survey asked respondents about the overall probability of existential catastrophe, this survey seeks to find which particular risk scenarios respondents find more likely. The survey was sent to 135 researchers, of which 75 responded. The survey presented five scenarios along with an “other”, and asked people to allocate probabilities across them (effectively, conditioning on an AI-caused existential catastrophe, and then asking which scenario happened).
The headline result is that all of the scenarios were roughly equally likely, even though individual researchers were opinionated (i.e. they didn’t just give uniform probabilities over all scenarios). Thus, there is quite a lot of disagreement over which risk scenarios are most likely (which is yet another reason not to take the results of the previous survey too seriously).
Planned summary for the Alignment Newsletter: