My impression is that there is indeed substantially less literature on misuse risk and structural risk, compared to accident risk, in relation to AI x-risk. (I’m less confident when it comes to a broader set of negative outcomes, not just x-risks, but that’s also less relevant here and less important to me.) I do think that that might the sort of work this post does less interesting if done in relation to those less-discussed types of risks, since there fewer disagreements have been revealed, so there’s less to analyse and summarise.
That said, I still expect interesting stuff along these lines could be done on those topics. It just might be a quicker job with a smaller output than this post.
I collected a handful of relevant sources and ideas here. I think someone reading those things and providing a sort of summary, analysis, and/or mapping could be pretty handy, and might even be doable in just a day or so of work. It might also be relatively easy to provide more “novel ideas” in the course of that work that it would’ve been for your post, since misuse/structural risks seem like less charted territory.
(Unfortunately I’m unlikely to do this myself, as I’m currently focused on nuclear war risk.)
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A separate point is that I’d guess that one reason why there’s less work on misuse/structural AI x-risk than on accidental AI x-risk is that a lot of people aren’t aware of those other categories of risks, or rarely think about them, or assume the risks are much smaller. And I think one reason for that is that people often write or talk about “AI x-risk” while actually only mentioning accidental AI x-risk. That’s part of why I say “So, personally, I think I’d have made that choice of scope even more explicit.”
(But again, I do very much like this post overall. And as a target of this quibble of mine, you’re in good company—I have the same quibble with The Precipice. I think one of the quibbles I most often have with posts I like is “This post seems to imply, or could be interpreted as implying, that it covers [topic]. But really it covers [some subset of that topic]. That’s fair enough and still very useful, but I think it’d be good to be clearer about what the scope is.”)
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I know some people working on expanded and more in-depth models like this post. It would be great to get your thoughts when they’re ready.
Sounds very cool! Yeah, I’d be happy to have a look at that work when it’s ready.
My impression is that there is indeed substantially less literature on misuse risk and structural risk, compared to accident risk, in relation to AI x-risk. (I’m less confident when it comes to a broader set of negative outcomes, not just x-risks, but that’s also less relevant here and less important to me.) I do think that that might the sort of work this post does less interesting if done in relation to those less-discussed types of risks, since there fewer disagreements have been revealed, so there’s less to analyse and summarise.
That said, I still expect interesting stuff along these lines could be done on those topics. It just might be a quicker job with a smaller output than this post.
I collected a handful of relevant sources and ideas here. I think someone reading those things and providing a sort of summary, analysis, and/or mapping could be pretty handy, and might even be doable in just a day or so of work. It might also be relatively easy to provide more “novel ideas” in the course of that work that it would’ve been for your post, since misuse/structural risks seem like less charted territory.
(Unfortunately I’m unlikely to do this myself, as I’m currently focused on nuclear war risk.)
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A separate point is that I’d guess that one reason why there’s less work on misuse/structural AI x-risk than on accidental AI x-risk is that a lot of people aren’t aware of those other categories of risks, or rarely think about them, or assume the risks are much smaller. And I think one reason for that is that people often write or talk about “AI x-risk” while actually only mentioning accidental AI x-risk. That’s part of why I say “So, personally, I think I’d have made that choice of scope even more explicit.”
(But again, I do very much like this post overall. And as a target of this quibble of mine, you’re in good company—I have the same quibble with The Precipice. I think one of the quibbles I most often have with posts I like is “This post seems to imply, or could be interpreted as implying, that it covers [topic]. But really it covers [some subset of that topic]. That’s fair enough and still very useful, but I think it’d be good to be clearer about what the scope is.”)
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Sounds very cool! Yeah, I’d be happy to have a look at that work when it’s ready.