I’ve found use of the term catastrophe/catastrophic in discussions of SB 1047 makes it harder for me to think about the issue. The scale of the harms captured by SB 1047 has a much much lower floor than what EAs/AIS people usually term catastrophic risk, like $0.5bn+ vs $100bn+. My view on the necessity of pre-harm enforcement, to take the lens of the Anthropic letter, is very different in each case. Similarly, while the Anthropic letter talks about the the bill as focused on catastrophic risk, it also talks about “skeptics of catastrophic risk”—surely this is about eg not buying that AI will be used to start a major pandemic, rather than whether eg there’ll be an increase in the number of hospital systems subject to ransomware attacks bc of AI.
I’ve found use of the term catastrophe/catastrophic in discussions of SB 1047 makes it harder for me to think about the issue. The scale of the harms captured by SB 1047 has a much much lower floor than what EAs/AIS people usually term catastrophic risk, like $0.5bn+ vs $100bn+. My view on the necessity of pre-harm enforcement, to take the lens of the Anthropic letter, is very different in each case. Similarly, while the Anthropic letter talks about the the bill as focused on catastrophic risk, it also talks about “skeptics of catastrophic risk”—surely this is about eg not buying that AI will be used to start a major pandemic, rather than whether eg there’ll be an increase in the number of hospital systems subject to ransomware attacks bc of AI.