Stress Externalities More in AI Safety Pitches

It's risky to connect AI safety to one side of an ideological conflict.

IMO this isn't a 100% accurate description of what the claims for AI risk being hard are. (And I would generally be against using inaccurate claims to attract people to legitimate areas)

For starters, arms race is probably a better terminology than externalities. When I think "externalities" I think - this technology creates X amount of private good and Y amount of public harm, and selfish actors have incentives create them. And while this description can be forcibly fit for AI x-risk, it is important to remember that x-risk is a harm from a selfish perspective too. Even if you don't care about the survival of other people, you care about your own survival, and therefore AI that causes your death or else permanently disempowers you is a harm to you too. An actor who honestly believes their AI has high probability of causing x-risk will not unilaterally deploy it anyway. Unlike, say, a fossil fuel company that will produce fossil fuel fully knowing the CO2 footprint they are creating, or a cigarette manufacturer that will produce cigarettes while having accurate statistics of the expected number of future cancer patients they are helping create.

In an arms race however, it can make sense for someone to pursue technologies that have significant x-risk, if there is also (in this case, utopian) upside they wish to capture before an opponent does.

Externalities is also not a good framing because it assumes that state regulation is sufficient to solve the problem, and prevent private actors from consuming public goods. It assumes the problem to be easy assuming govt support, and the hard part is primarily one of public protest and lobbying the government. However it is currently uncertain how much of a role state regulation will play in AI risk. It forces the problem into a conflict-theoretic frame rather an epistemic disagreement. Both kinds of problems require very different solutions.

However, arms race is also not the best terminology. For instance, Hayden Belfied has a post that cautions against prematurely claiming that US and China or OpenAI and Deepmind or whoever are in active arms race towards AGI. Link to post. Most progress iscurrently being pursued by unilateral actors who are (somewhat) open to reason and willing to signal in favour of motivations besides profit or military superiority. OpenAI for instance has explicitly ensured a non-profit stucture to govern them, for this reason.

Arms race is also not the best terminology because many AI x-risk researchers believe that AI x-risk is high even if you take the arms race out of the equation. Even if humanity agreed on one coordinated effort to deploy AGI, and did it slowly over a period of say a few decades, there are researchers who claim AI x-risk will be hard to mitigate, and that AI systems will be default be very hard to control. Yudkowksy (and a few others) go as far as saying we will only get one real shot at the problem in practice, in which we will risk extinction.

The core claims of AI x-risk are legitimately weird and I don't think it is easy to make it non-weird. Given this to be the case, I would caution against diluting the claims and prefer debating them head-on instead.

I'm very pro framing this as an externality. Doesn't just help with left-leaning people, it can also be  helpful for talking to other audiences, such as those immersed in economics or antitrust/competition law.

I like this framing a lot. My 60 second pitch for AI safety often includes something like this. “It’s all about making sure AI benefits humanity. We think AI could develop really quickly and shape our society, and the big corporations building it are thinking more about profits than about safety. We want to do the research they should be doing to make sure this technology helps everyone. It’s like working on online privacy in the 1990s and 2000s: Companies aren’t going to have the incentive to care, so you could make a lot of progress on a neglected problem by bringing early attention to the issue.”

Without thinking too deeply, I believe that this framing, i.e. one in line with AI developers are gambling with the fate of humanity for the sake of profit, and we need to stop them/ensure that their efforts don't have catastrophic effects, for AI risk could serve as a conversational cushion for those who are unfamiliar with the general state of AI progress and with the existential risk poorly aligned AI poses. 

Those unfamiliar with AI might disregard the extent of risk from AI if approached in conversation with remarks about how not only it is non-trivial that humanity might be extinguished by AI, but many researchers believe this event is highly likely to occur,  even in the next 25 years. I imagine such scenarios are, for them, generally unbelievable. 

The cushioning could, however, lead to people trying to think about AI risk independently or to them searching for more evidence and commentary online, which might subsequently lead to them to the conclusion that AI does in fact pose a significant existential risk to humanity. 

When trying to introduce the idea of AI risk to someone who is unfamiliar with it, it's probably a good idea to give an example of a current issue with AI, and then have them extrapolate. The example of poorly designed AI systems being used by corporations for click-through, as covered in the introduction of Human Compatible, seems good to use in your framing of AI safety as a public good. Most people are familiar with the ills of algorithms designed for social media, so it is not a great step to imagine researchers designing more powerful AI systems that are deleterious to humanity via a similar design issue but at a much more lethal level: 

They aren't particularly intelligent, but they are in a position to affect the entire world because they directly influence billions of people. Typically, such algorithms are designed to maximize click-through, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is to change the user's preferences so that they become more predictable. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable in which items they click on. 

Ultimately, you should probably tailor messages to your audience, given their understanding, objections/beliefs, values, etc. If you think they understand the phrase “externalities,” I agree, but a sizable number of people in the world do not properly understand the concept.

Overall, I agree that this is probably a good thing to emphasize, but FWIW I think a lot pitches I’ve heard/read do emphasize this insofar as it makes sense to do so, albeit not always with the specific term “externality.”