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.
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Summary: The actions taken this decade may be exceptionally important for the future of civilization, but we should be unusually hesitant to proclaim that any course of action is “best.” Still, we should try to think carefully about how we'll influence the future.
This post was written as part of an introduction to a new reading group I’m starting called “Doing Good in the Age of AGI.” If you want to follow along, the full curriculum can be found ...
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.