Anecdotally this feels very true. Those outside of the AI community feel way more optimistic than those I know who work in AI. The general population who are aware of GPT and LLM’s seem way too optimistic. When I talk to people about an AGI capabilities moratorium, AI researchers are way more likely to agree than those not working in AI.
Where do you know people who work in AI from? And where do you know people in the general population from?
(This might seem like a weird question, so lemme explain. If you e.g. know people who work in AI from LessWrong, and know people in the general population from your family, then these are separate mechanisms and it would seem that these could induce a collider bias, distorting the correlations.)
That is not my experience at all. Maybe it is because my friends from outside of the AI community are also outside of the tech bubble, but I’ve seen a lot of pessimism recently with the future of AI. In fact, they seem to easily both the orthogonality and the instrumentality thesis. Although I avoid delving into this topic of human extinction, since I don’t want to harm anyone’s mental health, the rare times were this topic comes up they seem to easily agree that this is a non-trivial possibility.
I guess the main reason is that, since they are outside of the tech bubble, they don’t seem to think that worrying about AI risk is being a Luddite, not truly understanding AI, or something like that. Moreover, since none of them works in AI, they don’t take any personal offense with the suggestion that capabilities advance may greatly harm humanity.
Anecdotally this feels very true. Those outside of the AI community feel way more optimistic than those I know who work in AI. The general population who are aware of GPT and LLM’s seem way too optimistic. When I talk to people about an AGI capabilities moratorium, AI researchers are way more likely to agree than those not working in AI.
Where do you know people who work in AI from? And where do you know people in the general population from?
(This might seem like a weird question, so lemme explain. If you e.g. know people who work in AI from LessWrong, and know people in the general population from your family, then these are separate mechanisms and it would seem that these could induce a collider bias, distorting the correlations.)
That is not my experience at all. Maybe it is because my friends from outside of the AI community are also outside of the tech bubble, but I’ve seen a lot of pessimism recently with the future of AI. In fact, they seem to easily both the orthogonality and the instrumentality thesis. Although I avoid delving into this topic of human extinction, since I don’t want to harm anyone’s mental health, the rare times were this topic comes up they seem to easily agree that this is a non-trivial possibility.
I guess the main reason is that, since they are outside of the tech bubble, they don’t seem to think that worrying about AI risk is being a Luddite, not truly understanding AI, or something like that. Moreover, since none of them works in AI, they don’t take any personal offense with the suggestion that capabilities advance may greatly harm humanity.