I definitely agree that it shouldn't hog all the money and interest - I just don't think that it's hogging a disproportionate share right now. Musk and Altman's OpenAI is a drop in the bucket in the universe of philanthropy. In the AI field, the bulk of work at companies and research at univesities is not going toward existential risk mitigation.
I think the "If society can get through these issues, then..." perspective is fundamentally flawed. We will always, always have urgent problems. Guanranteed. We need to work hard on them. But we also need to work a little bit on the big things that are not of most immediate concern. I think a great analogy for this is climate change. If people in the early Industrial Revolution knew what we know now about greenhouse gases, they wouldn't have been inclined to worry. The amount they were putting into the atmosphere just was not significant, and even if it rose sharply, it would be many generations before there might be an issue. And yet, if people had put some focus on long-term threats, we might be in less dire straits now.
I definitely sympathize with your experience as an AI educator being constantly peppered with hypotheticals about superintelligence. I love your fast.ai course and I am sure you'd rather talk about teaching AI than about something that may or may not be an issue decades from now. But that doesn't mean the issue doesn't deserve more funding.
Musk's topic choice may seem repetitive to us, as we are in the tech world and read about/discuss this topic all the time. But a bunch of older politician types probably have not even been exposed to these ideas of existential risk, and as they hold a lot of power, it's not a bad thing to educate them on. For what it's worth, Musk also spent a lot of time discussing nearer-term implications like job displacement.
> For what it's worth, Musk also spent a lot of time discussing nearer-term implications like job displacement.
That's great to hear - I honestly had no idea. Which suggests that the media doesn't have as much interest in covering that as it does the 'killer robots' angle...
I think that's what has happened with this topic in general and Elon in particular. In the talks I've seen him give, he seems less concerned with AI being "out of control" and more with it being a very powerful lever under the control of a small number of people. That's what he's given as the rationale for OpenAI, and if you look at the research on their website, it's all real research, not bloviating about killer robots. But of course the media just wants to talk about killer robots.
I think the "If society can get through these issues, then..." perspective is fundamentally flawed. We will always, always have urgent problems. Guanranteed. We need to work hard on them. But we also need to work a little bit on the big things that are not of most immediate concern. I think a great analogy for this is climate change. If people in the early Industrial Revolution knew what we know now about greenhouse gases, they wouldn't have been inclined to worry. The amount they were putting into the atmosphere just was not significant, and even if it rose sharply, it would be many generations before there might be an issue. And yet, if people had put some focus on long-term threats, we might be in less dire straits now.
I definitely sympathize with your experience as an AI educator being constantly peppered with hypotheticals about superintelligence. I love your fast.ai course and I am sure you'd rather talk about teaching AI than about something that may or may not be an issue decades from now. But that doesn't mean the issue doesn't deserve more funding.
Musk's topic choice may seem repetitive to us, as we are in the tech world and read about/discuss this topic all the time. But a bunch of older politician types probably have not even been exposed to these ideas of existential risk, and as they hold a lot of power, it's not a bad thing to educate them on. For what it's worth, Musk also spent a lot of time discussing nearer-term implications like job displacement.