How many of the experts in this survey are victims of the same problem? “Do you believe powerful AI is coming soon?” “Yeah.” “Do you believe it could be really dangerous?” “Yeah.” “Then shouldn’t you worry about this?” “Hey, what? Nobody does that! That would be a lot of work and make me look really weird!”
It does seem to be the default response of groups of humans to this kind of crisis. People died in burning restaurants because nobody else got up to run.
“Why should I, an expert in this field, react to the existential risk I acknowledge as a chance as if I were urgently worried, if all the other experts I know are just continuing with their research as always and they know what I know? It’s clear that existential risk is no good reason to abandon routine”.
As in Asch conformity experiment, whee a single other dissenter was enough to break compliance to the consensus, perhaps the example of even a single person who acts coherently with the belief the threat is serious and doesn’t come across as weird could break some of this apathy from pluralistic ignorance. Such examples seems to be one of the main factors in causing me to try to align my effort with my beliefs on what’s threatening the future of mankind twice, so far.
Fallacies leading to inability to take action in accordance with their values is one explanation for people’s apathy.
Another is that they simply prefer their own short term comfort more than most other values they would care to espouse. I know this to be the case for at least one person, and I am pretty sure there are more.
I am somehow convinced that a perceived loon like Elon Musk opening 20 positions for AI safety researchers, $10 million yearly salary, will have much better luck recruiting, than an elite university offering $100 000 (or the potential candidate’s current salary, whatever). In the first case, 5% existential risk for humanity will finally become intolerable. In the second—not so much.
Edit: people leaving Neuralink citing “premature push for human experiments” are evidence against my previous paragraph.
Since I wrote my comment I had lots of chances to prod at the apathy of people to act against imminent horrible doom.
I do believe that a large obstacle it’s that going “well, maybe I should do something about it, then. Let’s actually do that” requires a sudden level of mental effort and responsibility that’s… well, it’s not quite as unlikely as oxygen turning into gold, but you shouldn’t just expect people doing that (it took me a ridiculous amount of time before starting to do so).
People are going to require a lot of prodding or an environment where taking personal responsibility for a collective crisis is the social norm to get moving. 10 millions would cont as lot of prodding, yeah. 100k… eh, I’d guess lots of people would still jump at that, but not many of those who are paid the same amount or more.
So a calculation like “I can enjoy my life more by doing nothing, lots of other people can try to save the world in my place” might be involved, even if not explicitly. It’s a mixture of the Tragedy of the Commons and of Bystander Apathy, two psychological mechanism with plenty of literature.
The cure for bystander apathy is getting one person to lead by example. Since in this case there are several prominent such examples, a Tragedy of the Commons scenario seems more likely to me.
You are right, it’s not possible to tell if this happens implicitly or explicitly (in which case there is nothing to be done anyway).
It does seem to be the default response of groups of humans to this kind of crisis. People died in burning restaurants because nobody else got up to run.
“Why should I, an expert in this field, react to the existential risk I acknowledge as a chance as if I were urgently worried, if all the other experts I know are just continuing with their research as always and they know what I know? It’s clear that existential risk is no good reason to abandon routine”.
As in Asch conformity experiment, whee a single other dissenter was enough to break compliance to the consensus, perhaps the example of even a single person who acts coherently with the belief the threat is serious and doesn’t come across as weird could break some of this apathy from pluralistic ignorance. Such examples seems to be one of the main factors in causing me to try to align my effort with my beliefs on what’s threatening the future of mankind twice, so far.
Fallacies leading to inability to take action in accordance with their values is one explanation for people’s apathy.
Another is that they simply prefer their own short term comfort more than most other values they would care to espouse. I know this to be the case for at least one person, and I am pretty sure there are more.
I am somehow convinced that a perceived loon like Elon Musk opening 20 positions for AI safety researchers, $10 million yearly salary, will have much better luck recruiting, than an elite university offering $100 000 (or the potential candidate’s current salary, whatever). In the first case, 5% existential risk for humanity will finally become intolerable. In the second—not so much.
Edit: people leaving Neuralink citing “premature push for human experiments” are evidence against my previous paragraph.
Since I wrote my comment I had lots of chances to prod at the apathy of people to act against imminent horrible doom.
I do believe that a large obstacle it’s that going “well, maybe I should do something about it, then. Let’s actually do that” requires a sudden level of mental effort and responsibility that’s… well, it’s not quite as unlikely as oxygen turning into gold, but you shouldn’t just expect people doing that (it took me a ridiculous amount of time before starting to do so).
People are going to require a lot of prodding or an environment where taking personal responsibility for a collective crisis is the social norm to get moving. 10 millions would cont as lot of prodding, yeah. 100k… eh, I’d guess lots of people would still jump at that, but not many of those who are paid the same amount or more.
So a calculation like “I can enjoy my life more by doing nothing, lots of other people can try to save the world in my place” might be involved, even if not explicitly. It’s a mixture of the Tragedy of the Commons and of Bystander Apathy, two psychological mechanism with plenty of literature.
The cure for bystander apathy is getting one person to lead by example. Since in this case there are several prominent such examples, a Tragedy of the Commons scenario seems more likely to me.
You are right, it’s not possible to tell if this happens implicitly or explicitly (in which case there is nothing to be done anyway).