Raultic
Comments3
IPSOS conducted a survey recently about concerns in the US population in general. 71% of respondents answered that they were concerned about "The impact of AI (Artificial Intelligence) on jobs and society" but other areas that seem to be less pressing from an EA perspective scored higher. For example:
- "Crime and public safety" got 85% of people concerned,
- "Hacking, malware, and data breaches" got 86% of people concerned
- "Large businesses having too much power" got 79% of people concerned.
What is more, respondents seem to be taking the impact of AI rather lightly compared to other concerns: AI "only" gets 28% of respondents very concerned, which is lower than other issues, which get around 40% of people very concerned. The survey also asked a very similar question to the one YouGov asked: "Do you support or oppose the following policies? The government temporarily banning the use of AI systems in the United States until they are better understood". The results are very different, but that might be due to phrasing. Only 44% of respondents support the temporary ban. I think that the YouGov survey might be overestimating the number and degree of concern about AI.
You can find the full survey here.
I'm going to be doing an internship at one of leading NLP labs in some country in Eastern Europe - they publish a few papers at ICLR and NeurIPS every year. I have a chance to come up with an idea and convince them to work on this idea with me. They have no idea about AI safety, have never heard about EA or LW, but they are somewhat culturally aligned (if you squint a bit you could say that they operate by Crocker's Rules, but they would call it having direct and no bullshit approach).
My goal is to find a very concrete idea to work on that is relatable for people with NLP background. I'm thinking of this as more of a field building project rather than AI safety project.