This is a zero-sum game where every person working on x-risk is a technical person explicitly not working on advancing technologies (like AI) that will increase standards of living and help solve our global problems. If someone chooses to work on AI x-risk, they are probably qualified to work directly on the hard problems of AI itself. By not working on AI they are incrementally slowing down AI efforts, and therefore delaying access to technology that could save the world.
I wouldn't worry much about this, because the financial incentives to advance AI are much stronger than the ones to work on AI safety. AI safety work is just a blip compared to AI advancement work.
So here's a utilitarian calculation for you: assume that AGI will allow us to conquer disease and natural death, by virtue of the fact that true AGI removes scarcity of intellectual resources to work on these problems. It's a bit of a naïve view, but I'm asking you to assume it only for the sake of argument. Then every moment someone is working on x-risk problems instead, they are potentially delaying the advent of true AGI by some number of minutes, hours, or days. Multiply that by the number of people who die unnecessary deaths every day -- hundreds of thousands -- and that is the amount of blood on the hands of someone who is capable but chooses not to work on making the technology widely available as quickly as possible. Existential risk can only be justified as a more pressing concern if can be reasonably demonstrated to have a higher probability of causing more deaths than inaction.
You should really read Astronomical Waste before you try to make this kind of quasi-utilitarian argument about x-risk :)
Show me the code. Demonstrate for me (in a toy but realistic environment) an AI/proto-AGI that turns evil, built using the architectures that are the current focus of research, and give me reasonable technical justification for why we should expect the same properties in larger, more complex environments.
What do you think of this example?
https://www.facebook.com/jesse.newton.37/posts/776177951574
(I'm sure there are better examples to be found, I'm just trying to figure out what you are looking for.)
I've read Astronomical Waste. There's some good ideas in it, but I simply don't buy the premise that "potential lives" are comparable to existing lives. In utilitarian terms I suppose I value potential lives at zero.
Regarding the poopy Roomba, that's not anything close to resembling an AGI. Dumb mechanical algorithms follow dumb mechanical algorithms. There's nothing really interesting to be learned there. But even if you take it as an example at face value, it was relatively simple for its owner to capture, turn off, and clean up. Exaggeration a...
There have been a few attempts to reach out to broader audiences in the past, but mostly in very politically/ideologically loaded topics.
After seeing several examples of how little understanding people have about the difficulties in creating a friendly AI, I'm horrified. And I'm not even talking about a farmer on some hidden ranch, but about people who should know about these things, researchers, software developers meddling with AI research, and so on.
What made me write this post, was a highly voted answer on stackexchange.com, which claims that the danger of superhuman AI is a non-issue, and that the only way for an AI to wipe out humanity is if "some insane human wanted that, and told the AI to find a way to do it". And the poster claims to be working in the AI field.
I've also seen a TEDx talk about AIs. The talker didn't even hear about the paperclip maximizer, and the talk was about the dangers presented by the AIs as depicted in the movies, like the Terminator, where an AI "rebels", but we can hope that AIs would not rebel as they cannot feel emotion, so we should hope the events depicted in such movies will not happen, and all we have to do is for ourselves to be ethical and not deliberately write malicious AI, and then everything will be OK.
The sheer and mind-boggling stupidity of this makes me want to scream.
We should find a way to increase public awareness of the difficulty of the problem. The paperclip maximizer should become part of public consciousness, a part of pop culture. Whenever there is a relevant discussion about the topic, we should mention it. We should increase awareness of old fairy tales with a jinn who misinterprets wishes. Whatever it takes to ingrain the importance of these problems into public consciousness.
There are many people graduating every year who've never heard about these problems. Or if they did, they dismiss it as a non-issue, a contradictory thought experiment which can be dismissed without a second though:
We don't want our future AI researches to start working with such a mentality.
What can we do to raise awareness? We don't have the funding to make a movie which becomes a cult classic. We might start downvoting and commenting on the aforementioned stackexchange post, but that would not solve much if anything.