"A Taxonomy of AI Panic Facilitators" A visualization of leading AI Doomers (X-risk open letters, media interviews & OpEds). Some AI experts enable them, while others oppose them. The gender dynamics are fucked up. It says a lot about the panic itself. Your thoughts?
⬇ Eliezer Yudkowsky Jaan Tallinn Nick Bostrom Max Tegmark Tristan Harris Yuval Noah Harari Elon Musk Dario Amodei Sam Altman Connor Leahy Emad Mostaque Demis Hassabis Gary Marcus Erik Brynjolfsson Timnit Gebru Melanie Mitchell Margaret Mitchell Emily Bender Meredith Whittaker
Based on today's @washingtonpost & @OpenAI's articles: Panic-as-a-Business = We're telling you will all die from a Godlike AI… so all resources must focus on that AI Panic Marketing = We're building a potentially deadly Superintelligence… see how much is invested in taming it
@OpenAI ⤵ "The vast power of Superintelligence could… lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human EXTINCTION. We are dedicating 20% of the compute… to solving the problem." https://openai.com/blog/introd...
@DrTechlash 1. Cherrypicking names is misleading and unfair to folks like Mira Murati, Gillian Hadfield, Pattie Maes, Dawn Song, Victoria Krakovna & Yann LeCun 2. More importantly, we'd all be better off if smart people like you spent less time trying to tribalize & name-call (e.g. "panic")
@erikbryn Media attention is what I'm examining. So, by "AI Panic Facilitators," I mean those who promote the Doomsday scenarios through interviews and op-eds. Because they are salient in the media, they are salient *examples* 1/3
@DrTechlash Marc Andreessen and Eric Weinstein would comfortably fit on the anti-AI panic side. But that would break the gender narrative?
@DrTechlash Interesting categories. Is there a reason why Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are not included? They seem to be among the most prominent names under the letters and were interviewed on this a lot
@DrTechlash Are you sure about Emad Mostaque? I know he signed that letter. I heard him say somewhere in reference to the letter that he wasn't that doomish. And here he talks about AI pretty positively. https://www.youtube.com/shorts...
@magnusviri A quick example
@DrTechlash Implying that all those people are discussing xrisk purely out of cynical, conspiratorial self interest does not contribute to the conversation
@DrTechlash The gender dynamics are more skewed if you ignore all the women in groups other than your own. eg @ajeya_cotra @KatjaGrace @vkrakovna @jesswhittles
@DrTechlash Do you seriously think that humans will be able to control AI systems much smarter than us? That's what the 'panic promoters' (like me) are worried about. Why aren't you worried?
@DrTechlash This graph seems to imply that most "Promoters of AI Panic" have some sort of ulterior motive, other than, say, preventing catastrophic outcomes. Where do activist volunteers who share the concerns of the experts fit in here?
@DrTechlash First I don’t make 30 under 30, now this
@DrTechlash Group 1 are personally afraid of AGI taking over (x risk). Add Leahy, Hofstadter, Russell, Hinton. Group 2 are concerned but working on AGI anyway, add Musk, Bengio. Group 3 and 4 are concerned about political and social impacts of weak AI, because they don’t believe in AGI.
@DrTechlash "The gender dynamics are fucked up. It says a lot about the panic itself." What does it say?
@DrTechlash It's good but I'm reluctant to categorise anyone who thinks three year old GPT3 is the SOTA as an expert, but that's just me.
@DrTechlash @ylecun Missing “not-concerned experts” before AI Ethics… otherwise, awesome!
@DrTechlash This is really great work, thank you
@DrTechlash @ylecun Yudkowksy and Max Tegmark are so bad at grifting they don't even offer a product! They lose sleep and time with family just to scare people about AI and forgot they are supposed to capitalize on it somehow.
@DrTechlash You're missing Ajeya Cotra, Kelsey Piper, Victoria Krakovna (amongst others)