An interesting missing mood I’ve observed in discussions of AI safety: When a new idea for achieving safe AI is proposed, you might expect that people concerned with AI risk would show a glimmer of eager curiosity. Perhaps the AI safety problem is actually solvable!
But I’ve pretty much never observed this. A more common reaction seems to be a sort of an uneasy defensiveness, sometimes in combination with changing the subject.
Another response I occasionally see is someone mentioning a potential problem in a manner that practically sounds like they are rebuking the person who shared the new idea.
I eventually came to the conclusion that there is some level on which many people in the AI safety community actually don’t want to see the problem of AI safety solved, because too much of their self-concept is wrapped up in AI safety being a super difficult problem. I highly doubt this occurs on a conscious level, it’s probably due to the same sort of subconscious psychological defenses you describe, e.g. embarrassment at not having seen the solution oneself.
An interesting missing mood I’ve observed in discussions of AI safety: When a new idea for achieving safe AI is proposed, you might expect that people concerned with AI risk would show a glimmer of eager curiosity. Perhaps the AI safety problem is actually solvable!
But I’ve pretty much never observed this. A more common reaction seems to be a sort of an uneasy defensiveness, sometimes in combination with changing the subject.
Another response I occasionally see is someone mentioning a potential problem in a manner that practically sounds like they are rebuking the person who shared the new idea.
I eventually came to the conclusion that there is some level on which many people in the AI safety community actually don’t want to see the problem of AI safety solved, because too much of their self-concept is wrapped up in AI safety being a super difficult problem. I highly doubt this occurs on a conscious level, it’s probably due to the same sort of subconscious psychological defenses you describe, e.g. embarrassment at not having seen the solution oneself.