Comment by jdthedisciple
2 years ago
Any usage of the word "safe" without an accompanying precise definition of it is utter null and void.
2 years ago
Any usage of the word "safe" without an accompanying precise definition of it is utter null and void.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk, signed by Ilya Sutskever among others.
I clicked, hoping that "human extinction" was just the worst thing they were against. But that's the only thing. That leaves open a whole lot of bad stuff that they're OK with AI doing (as long as it doesn't kill literally everyone).
That's like saying a bus driver is okay with violence on his bus because he has signed a statement against dangerous driving.
There are at least three competing definitions of the word:
There's the existential threat definition of "safe", put forth by Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and others. That's the idea that a superintelligent AI, or even one just incrementally smarter and faster than the humans working on AI, could enter a positive feedback loop in which it becomes overwhelmingly smarter and faster than humans, people can't control it, and it does unpredictable things.
There's the investor relations definition of "safe", which seems to be the one typically adopted by mission statements of OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others. That's (cynically) the fear that a chatbot with their branding on it promulgates culturally/ethically/morally unacceptable things it found in some dark corner the Internet, causing end users to do or think something reprehensible (and, not incidentally, causing really bad press in the process).
There's the societal harm definition of "safe", which is at first glance similar in to the investor relations safety definition, but which focuses on the specific judgements made by those filtering teams and the knock-on effects of access to these tools, like economic disruption to the job market.
Everyone seems to be talking past each other, dismissing or ignoring the concerns of other groups.