An idea for increasing the impact of this research: Mitigating the “goalpost moving” effect for “but surely a bit more progress on capabilities will solve this”.
I suspect that many people who are sceptical of this issue will, by default, never sit down and properly think about this. If they did, they might make some falsifiable predictions and change their minds—but many of them might never do that. Or perhaps many people will, but it will all happen very gradually, and we will never get a good enough “coordination point” that would allow us to take needle-shifting actions.
I also suspect there are ways of making this go better. I am not quite sure what they are, but here are some ideas: Making and publishing surveys. Operationalizing all of this better, in particular with respect to the “how much does this actually matter?” aspect. Formulating some memorable “hypothesis” that makes it easier to refer to this in conversations and papers (cf “orthogonality thesis”). Perhaps making some proponents of “the opposing view” make some testable predictions, ideally some that can be tested with systems whose failures won’t be catastrophic yet?
An idea for increasing the impact of this research: Mitigating the “goalpost moving” effect for “but surely a bit more progress on capabilities will solve this”.
I suspect that many people who are sceptical of this issue will, by default, never sit down and properly think about this. If they did, they might make some falsifiable predictions and change their minds—but many of them might never do that. Or perhaps many people will, but it will all happen very gradually, and we will never get a good enough “coordination point” that would allow us to take needle-shifting actions.
I also suspect there are ways of making this go better. I am not quite sure what they are, but here are some ideas: Making and publishing surveys. Operationalizing all of this better, in particular with respect to the “how much does this actually matter?” aspect. Formulating some memorable “hypothesis” that makes it easier to refer to this in conversations and papers (cf “orthogonality thesis”). Perhaps making some proponents of “the opposing view” make some testable predictions, ideally some that can be tested with systems whose failures won’t be catastrophic yet?