No disagreements here; I just want to note that if “the EA community” waits too long for such a pivot, at some point AI labs will probably be faced with people from the general population protesting because even now a substantial share of the US population views the AI progress in a very negative light. Even if these protests don’t accomplish anything directly, they might indirectly affect any future efforts. For example, an EA-run fire alarm might be compromised a bit because the memetic ground would already be captured. In this case, the concept of “AI risk” would, in the minds of AI researchers, shift from “obscure overconfident hypotheticals of a nerdy philosophy” to “people with different demographics, fewer years of education, and a different political party than us being totally unreasonable over something that we understand far better”.
I’m not sure I would agree. The post you linked to is titled “A majority of the public supports AI development.” Only 10% of the population is strongly opposed to. You’re making an implicit assumption that the public is going to turn against the technology in the next couple of years but I see no reason to believe that.
In the past, public opinion really only turns against technology dolloping a big disaster. But we may not see a big AI induced disaster before a change in public opinion will be irrelevant to AGI
No disagreements here; I just want to note that if “the EA community” waits too long for such a pivot, at some point AI labs will probably be faced with people from the general population protesting because even now a substantial share of the US population views the AI progress in a very negative light. Even if these protests don’t accomplish anything directly, they might indirectly affect any future efforts. For example, an EA-run fire alarm might be compromised a bit because the memetic ground would already be captured. In this case, the concept of “AI risk” would, in the minds of AI researchers, shift from “obscure overconfident hypotheticals of a nerdy philosophy” to “people with different demographics, fewer years of education, and a different political party than us being totally unreasonable over something that we understand far better”.
I’m not sure I would agree. The post you linked to is titled “A majority of the public supports AI development.” Only 10% of the population is strongly opposed to. You’re making an implicit assumption that the public is going to turn against the technology in the next couple of years but I see no reason to believe that.
In the past, public opinion really only turns against technology dolloping a big disaster. But we may not see a big AI induced disaster before a change in public opinion will be irrelevant to AGI
And that’s really more like 6% after you take in account the lizardman constant.