X-Risk sentiment in the audience: at one point in the debate, one participant asked the audience who thought AI was an existential risk. From memory, around 2/3s of students put up their hands.
Do you have a rough sense of how many of these had interacted with AI Safety programming/content from your group? Like, was a substantial part of the audience just members from your group who had heard EA arguments about AIS?
I’d guess less than 1/4 of the people had engaged w AIS (e.g. read some books/articles). Perhaps 1/5 had heard about EA before. Most were interested in AI though.
Last month we held an AI Safety Debate with the UCL EA Society.
I thought I'd share a few thoughts from running the event: both about community building, because I think the event went well, and more broadly about AI Safety. Not of all these thoughts are mine: thank you to Erin and Otto for sharing theirs.
A full YouTube recording is here:
Community-Building Takes
Entertainment Value: Around 60/70 people attended, which is around 10x our normal attendance for a typical event. I think this is primarily because a debate is interesting to watch than a speaker event, or a workshop. Perhaps this was already obvious others, but if you are looking for an event to reach a big audience, entertainment value is important.
Disagreeing about AI risk is okay: before I was concerned that the event might be overly polarising. The opposite happened – despite disagreements about 'rogue AI' scenarios, the speakers agreed broadly that: AI could be transformative for humanity, misuse risks are serious, and that regulation/evals are important. This may not have happened if the people arguing against x-risk were e/accs.
X-Risk sentiment in the audience: at one point in the debate, one participant asked the audience who thought AI was an existential risk. From memory, around 2/3s of students put up their hands. This shouldn't be too surprising, given that the 'public' is worried about about x-risk (e.g. here). (Although, obviously, this wasn't a representative sample.)
AI Things
AI Ethics folks aren't aware of the common ground: At one point in the debate, the "x-risk is a distraction" argument was brought up. In response, Reuben Adams mentioned that there is potential common ground between "ethics" and "safety" concerns, through evals. This seemed to have genuinely surprised the Science/Technology Professor (Jack Stilgoe) who was arguing against x-risk. Perhaps this is a result from Twitter echo-chambers? Who knows.
(Bio) Misuse Risks were most convincing to the audience: this seemed like a particularly persuasive threat model, based on conversations after. I don't think this is particularly novel: I believe bio-terror was a prominent theme in the discussion of 'catastrophic risk' at the UK AI Summit last November.
Feel free to reach out if you are a community-builder and you'd like advise on organising a similar event.
TLDR: Everyone’s talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team...
I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.
The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least...
Do you have a rough sense of how many of these had interacted with AI Safety programming/content from your group? Like, was a substantial part of the audience just members from your group who had heard EA arguments about AIS?
I’d guess less than 1/4 of the people had engaged w AIS (e.g. read some books/articles). Perhaps 1/5 had heard about EA before. Most were interested in AI though.