(Note: This post is probably old news for most readers here, but I find myself repeating this surprisingly often in conversation, so I decided to turn it into a post.)
I don't usually go around saying that I care about AI "safety". I go around saying that I care about "alignment" (although that word is slowly sliding backwards on the semantic treadmill, and I may need a new one soon).
But people often describe me as an “AI safety” researcher to others. This seems like a mistake to me, since it's treating one part of the problem (making an AGI "safe") as though it were the whole problem, and since “AI safety” is often misunderstood as meaning “we win if we can build a useless-but-safe AGI”, or “safety means never having to take on any risks”.
Following Eliezer, I think of an AGI as "safe" if deploying it carries no more than a 50% chance of killing more than a billion people:
When I say that alignment is difficult, I mean that in practice, using the techniques we actually have, "please don't disassemble literally everyone with probability roughly 1" is an overly large ask that we are not on course to get. [...] Practically all of the difficulty is in getting to "less than certainty of killing literally everyone". Trolley problems are not an interesting subproblem in all of this; if there are any survivors, you solved alignment. At this point, I no longer care how it works, I don't care how you got there, I am cause-agnostic about whatever methodology you used, all I am looking at is prospective results, all I want is that we have justifiable cause to believe of a pivotally useful AGI 'this will not kill literally everyone'.
Notably absent from this definition is any notion of “certainty” or "proof". I doubt we're going to be able to prove much about the relevant AI systems, and pushing for proofs does not seem to me to be a particularly fruitful approach (and never has; the idea that this was a key part of MIRI’s strategy is a common misconception about MIRI).
On my models, making an AGI "safe" in this sense is a bit like finding a probabilistic circuit: if some probabilistic circuit gives you the right answer with 51% probability, then it's probably not that hard to drive the success probability significantly higher than that.
If anyone can deploy an AGI that is less than 50% likely to kill more than a billion people, then they've probably... well, they've probably found a way to keep their AGI weak enough that it isn’t very useful. But if they can do that with an AGI capable of ending the acute risk period, then they've probably solved most of the alignment problem. Meaning that it should be easy to drive the probability of disaster dramatically lower.
The condition that the AI actually be useful for pivotal acts is an important one. We can already build AI systems that are “safe” in the sense that they won’t destroy the world. The hard part is creating a system that is safe and relevant.
Another concern with the term “safety” (in anything like the colloquial sense) is that the sort of people who use it often endorse the "precautionary principle" or other such nonsense that advocates never taking on risks even when the benefits clearly dominate.
In ordinary engineering, we recognize that safety isn’t infinitely more important than everything else. The goal here is not "prevent all harms from AI", the goal here is "let's use AI to produce long-term near-optimal outcomes (without slaughtering literally everybody as a side-effect)".
Currently, what I expect to happen is that humanity destroys itself with misaligned AGI. And I think we’re nowhere near knowing how to avoid that outcome. So the threat of “unsafe” AI indeed looms extremely large—indeed, this seems to be rather understating the point!—and I endorse researchers doing less capabilities work and publishing less, in the hope that this gives humanity enough time to figure out how to do alignment before it’s too late.
But I view this strategic situation as part of the larger project “cause AI to produce optimal long-term outcomes”. I continue to think it's critically important for humanity to build superintelligences eventually, because whether or not the vast resources of the universe are put towards something wonderful depends on the quality and quantity of cognition that is put to this task.
If using the label “AI safety” for this problem causes us to confuse a proxy goal (“safety”) for the actual goal “things go great in the long run”, then we should ditch the label. And likewise, we should ditch the term if it causes researchers to mistake a hard problem (“build an AGI that can safely end the acute risk period and give humanity breathing-room to make things go great in the long run”) for a far easier one (“build a safe-but-useless AI that I can argue counts as an ‘AGI’”).
If an alignment-minded person is currently doing capabilities work under the assumption that they'd be replaced by an equally (or more) capable researcher less concerned about alignment, I think that's badly mistaken. The number of people actually pushing the frontier forward is not all that large. Researchers at that level are not fungible; the differences between the first-best and second-best available candidates for roles like that are often quite large. The framing of an arms race is mistaken; the prize for "winning" is that you die sooner. Dying later is better. If you're in a position like that I'd be happy to talk to you, or arrange for you to talk to another member of the Lightcone team.
I do not significantly credit the possibility that Google (or equivalent) will try to make life difficult for people who manage to successfully convince the marginal capabilities researcher to switch tracks, absent evidence. I agree that historical examples of vaguely similar things exist, but the ones I'm familiar with don't seem analogous, and we do in fact have fairly strong evidence about the kinds of antics that various megacorps get up to, which seem to be strongly predicted by their internal culture.