Another issue with greenwashing and safetywashing is that it gives people who earnestly care a false impression that they are meaningfully contributing.
Despite thousands of green initiatives, we’re likely to blow way past the 1.5c mark because the far majority of those initiatives failed to address the core causes of climate change. Each plastic-straw ban and reusable diaper gives people an incorrect impression that they are doing something meaningful to improve the climate.
Similarly I worry that many people will convince themselves that they are doing something meaningful to improve AI Safety, but because they failed to address the core issues they end up contributing nothing. I am not saying this as a pure hypothetical, I think this is already happening to a large extent.
I quit a well paying job to become a policy trainee working with AI in the European Parliament because I was optimizing for “do something which looks like contributing to AI safety”, with a strenuous at best model of how my work would actually lead to a world which creates safe AI. What horrified me during this was that a majority of people I spoke to in the field of AI policy seemed to be making similar errors as I was.
Many of us justify our work this by pointing out the second-order benefits such as “policy work is field-building”, “This policy will help create better norms” or “I’m skilling up / getting myself to a place of influence”, and while these second order effects are real and important, we should be very sceptical of interventions whose first-order effects aren’t promising.
I apologize that this became a bit of a rant about AI Policy, but I have been annoyed with myself for making such basic errors and this post helped me put a word on what I was doing.
I’m worried about this too, especially since I think it’s surprisingly easy here (relative to most fields/goals) to accidentally make the situation even worse. For example, my sense is people often mistakenly conclude that working on capabilities will help with safety somehow, just because an org’s leadership pays lip service to safety concerns—even if the org only spends a small fraction of its attention/resources on safety work, actively tries to advance SOTA, etc.
we should be very sceptical of interventions whose first-order effects aren’t promising.
This seems reasonable, but I think this suspicion is currently applied too liberally. In general, it seems like second-order effects are often very large. For instance, some AI safety research is currently funded by a billionaire whose path to impact on AI safety was to start a cryptocurrency exchange. I’ve written about the general distaste for diffuse effects and how that might be damaging here; if you disagree I’d love to hear your response.
In general, I don’t think it makes sense to compare policy to plastic straws, because I think you can easily crunch the numbers and find that plastic straws are a very small part of the problem. I don’t think it’s even remotely the case that “policy is a very small part of the problem” since in a more cooperative world I think we would be far more prudent with respect to AI development (that’s not to say policy is tractable, just that it seems very much more difficult to dismiss than straws).
Another issue with greenwashing and safetywashing is that it gives people who earnestly care a false impression that they are meaningfully contributing.
Despite thousands of green initiatives, we’re likely to blow way past the 1.5c mark because the far majority of those initiatives failed to address the core causes of climate change. Each plastic-straw ban and reusable diaper gives people an incorrect impression that they are doing something meaningful to improve the climate.
Similarly I worry that many people will convince themselves that they are doing something meaningful to improve AI Safety, but because they failed to address the core issues they end up contributing nothing. I am not saying this as a pure hypothetical, I think this is already happening to a large extent.
I quit a well paying job to become a policy trainee working with AI in the European Parliament because I was optimizing for “do something which looks like contributing to AI safety”, with a strenuous at best model of how my work would actually lead to a world which creates safe AI. What horrified me during this was that a majority of people I spoke to in the field of AI policy seemed to be making similar errors as I was.
Many of us justify our work this by pointing out the second-order benefits such as “policy work is field-building”, “This policy will help create better norms” or “I’m skilling up / getting myself to a place of influence”, and while these second order effects are real and important, we should be very sceptical of interventions whose first-order effects aren’t promising.
I apologize that this became a bit of a rant about AI Policy, but I have been annoyed with myself for making such basic errors and this post helped me put a word on what I was doing.
I’m worried about this too, especially since I think it’s surprisingly easy here (relative to most fields/goals) to accidentally make the situation even worse. For example, my sense is people often mistakenly conclude that working on capabilities will help with safety somehow, just because an org’s leadership pays lip service to safety concerns—even if the org only spends a small fraction of its attention/resources on safety work, actively tries to advance SOTA, etc.
This seems reasonable, but I think this suspicion is currently applied too liberally. In general, it seems like second-order effects are often very large. For instance, some AI safety research is currently funded by a billionaire whose path to impact on AI safety was to start a cryptocurrency exchange. I’ve written about the general distaste for diffuse effects and how that might be damaging here; if you disagree I’d love to hear your response.
In general, I don’t think it makes sense to compare policy to plastic straws, because I think you can easily crunch the numbers and find that plastic straws are a very small part of the problem. I don’t think it’s even remotely the case that “policy is a very small part of the problem” since in a more cooperative world I think we would be far more prudent with respect to AI development (that’s not to say policy is tractable, just that it seems very much more difficult to dismiss than straws).