If we’re dead-serious about infohazards, we can’t just be thinking in terms of ‘information that might accidentally become known to others through naive LessWrong newbies sharing it on Twitter’.
Rather, we need to be thinking in terms of ‘how could we actually prevent the military intelligence analysts of rival superpowers from being able to access this information’?
My personal hunch is that there are very few ways we could set up sites, security protocols, and vetting methods that would be sufficient to prevent access by a determined government. Which would mean, in practice, that we’d be sharing our infohazards only with the most intelligent, capable, and dangerous agents and organizations out there.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t try to be very cautious about this issue. Just that we shouldn’t be naive about what the American NSA, Russian GRU, or Chinese MSS would be capable of.
“Exfohazard” is a quicker way to say “information that should not be leaked”. AI capabilities has progressed on seemingly-trivial breakthroughs, and now we have shorter timelines.
The more people who know and understand the “exfohazard” concept, the safer we are from AI risk.