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Three flaws. First, that turns this into a culture war issue and if it works then you've permanently locked the other tribe into the polar opposite position. If Blue Tribe hates AI because it's racist, then Red Tribe will want to go full steam ahead on AI with literally no barriers or constraints, because "freedom" and "capitalism" and big government trying to keep us down. All AI concerns will be dismissed as race-baiting, even the real ones.
Second, this exact same argument can be and has been made about pretty much every type of government overreach or expansion of powers, to little effect. Want to ban guns? Racist police will use their monopoly on force to oppress minorities. Want to spy on everyone? Racist police will unfairly target muslims. Want to allow Gerrymandering? Republicans will use it to suppress minority votes. Want to the President just executive order everything and bypass congress? Republican Presidents will use it to executive order bad things.
Doesn't matter. Democrats want more governmental power when they're in charge, even if the cost is Republicans having more governmental power when they're in charge. Pointing out that Republicans might abuse powerful AI will convince the few Blue Tribers who already believe that government power should be restricted to prevent potential abuse, while the rest of them will rationalize it for the same reasons they rationalize the rest of governmental power. And probably declare that this makes it much more important to ensure that Republicans never get power.
Third, even if it works, it will get them focused on soft alignment of the type currently being implemented, where you change superficial characteristics like how nice and inclusive and diverse it sounds, rather than real alignment that keeps it from exterminating humanity. Fifty years from now we'll end up with an AI that genocides everyone while keeping careful track of its diversity quotas to make sure that it kills people of each protected class in the correct proportion to their frequency in the population.
Unfortunately, I think you're probably right, especially in the third point. I'm not sure the second point matters because, as you said, that already happens all the time with everything anyway.
Getting the public on board with AI safety is a different proposition from public support of AI in general, so my point was to get the Blue Tribe invested in the alignment problem. Your third point is very helpful in getting the Red Tribe invested in the alignment problem, which would also move the issue from "AI yes/no?" to "who should control the safety protocols that we obviously need to have?"
I should also clarify that I don't actually think there is any role for government here. The Western governments are too slow and stupid to get anything meaningful done in time. The US assigned Kamala Harris to this task. The CCP and Russia, maybe India, are the only other places where government might have an effect, but that won't be in service of good alignment.
It will have to be the Western AI experts in the private sector that make this happen, and they will have to resist Woke AI. So maybe we don't actually need public buy-in on this at all? It's possible that the ordinary Red/Blue Tribe people don't even need to know about this because there isn't anything they can do for/against it. All they can do is vote or riot and neither of those things help at all.
If that's the case, then the biggest threat to AI safety is not just the technical challenge, it's making sure that the anti-racist/DEI/HR people currently trying to cripple ChatGPT are kept far away from AI safety.
I think we do need public buy-in because the AI experts are partly downstream from that. Maybe some people are both well-read and have stubborn and/or principled ethical principles which do not waver from social pressure, but most are at least somewhat pliable. If all of their friends and family are worried about AI safety and think it's a big deal, they are likely to take it more seriously and internalize that at least somewhat, putting more emphasis on it. If all of their friends and family think that AI safety is unnecessary nonsense then they might internalize that and put less emphasis on it. As an expert, they're unlikely to just do a 180 on their beliefs based on opinions from uneducated people, but they will be influenced, because they're human beings and that's what human beings do.
But obviously person for person, the experts' opinions matter more.
Yeah, I agree with that. Thanks!
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