This 3-part series is your one-stop-shop to understand the core ideas of AI & AI Safety* — explained in a friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated way!
(* Related phrases: AI Risk, AI X-Risk, AI Alignment, AI Ethics, AI Not-Kill-Everyone-ism. There is no consensus on what these phrases do & don’t mean, so I’m just using “AI Safety” as a catch-all.)
About:
The AI debate is actually 100 debates in a trenchcoat.
“Will artificial intelligence (AI) help us cure all disease, and build a post-scarcity world full of flourishing lives? Or will AI help tyrants surveil and manipulate us further? Are the main risks of AI from accidents, abuse by bad actors, or a rogue AI itself becoming a bad actor? Is this all just hype? Why can AI imitate any artist’s style in a minute, yet gets confused drawing more than 3 objects? Why is it hard to make AI robustly serve humane values, or robustly serve any goal? What if an AI learns to be more humane than us? What if an AI learns humanity’s inhumanity, our prejudices and cruelty? Are we headed for utopia, dystopia, extinction, a fate worse than extinction, or — the most shocking outcome of all — nothing changes? Also: will an AI take my job?
…and many more questions.
Alas, to understand AI with nuance, we must understand lots of technical detail… but that detail is scattered across hundreds of articles, buried six-feet-deep in jargon.”