Comment by chrisldgk
2 years ago
I‘d say there’s a third option - anyone working in the space realized they can make a fuckton of money if they just say how „dangerous“ the product is, because not only is it great marketing to talk do that, but you might also get literal trillions of dollars from the government if you do it right.
I don’t have anything against researchers, and I agree I know a lot less about AI than they do. I do however know humans, and not assuming they’re going to take a chance to get filthy rich by doing something so banal is naive.
This is well reasoned, and certainly happens, but I definitely think there’s strong evidence that there are, in fact, true believers. Yudkowsky and Hinton for one, but in general the shape of the trend is “rich engineers leave big companies because of ethical issues”. As you can probably guess, that is not a wise economic decision for the individual!