AI Safety Dance
AI summary of the linked articleThis introductory series on AI and AI Safety, written by its author in a "friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated" style, is split into three parts published from May 2024 to December 2025. Its core framing holds that the main problems in AI come down to two conflicts: logic versus intuition, and problems in the AI versus problems in the humans who use it. The author says the series was made in collaboration with Hack Club, a worldwide community for and by teen hackers. The article also argues that AI Safety is not a fringe concern, citing government AI Safety departments in the US and UK and warnings from researchers including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. |
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2 comments  (Catastrophic AI Risk doesn't even require "super-human general intelligence"! For example, an AI that's "only" good at designing viruses could help a bio-terrorist organization (like Aum Shinrikyo[18]18) kill millions of people.) io-engineered pandemics: A bio-terrorist cult (like Aum Shinrikyo[18:1]20) uses AI (like AlphaFold[20]21) and DNA-printing (which is getting cheaper fast[21]22) to design multiple new super-viruses, and release them simultaneously in major airports around the globe. (Proof of concept: Scientists have already re-built polio from mail-order DNA... two decades ago.[22]23) I will be leaving links to the responses to this conjecture, since it's been repeated so often. the TL;DR is that bioterrorism is not an AI-activated risk, there is no credible empirical evidence establishing that the knowledge on its own greatly augments the process, and ignoring the obvious zoonotic events that we're already exposed to all the time, the major concern of biological threats is that data collection & en vivo/vitro research are concentrated to facilities with varying degrees (or neglect) of oversight. Furthermore, we have clear evidence that incentives within such facilities can be perverse to the extent of purposely leaking pathogens (e.g. 2001 anthrax attacks). Ultimately, biology requires controlled, sterile environments, and the equipment in this field is already heavily-controlled & heavily-surveilled. The chief risk is well downstream of the en silica theory. Criminal activity is discrete conduct separate from the discrete speech that AI occupies. Giving everyone an encyclopedia of molecular biology is a public good by comparison to Aum Shinrikyo.  Thanks for commenting. I always find it incredibly effortful to dispel the easily written arguments of AI doomers |
