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Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems — EA Forum

forum.effectivealtruism.org · 31 words · saved by 1 readers

Some AI safety problems are legible (obvious or understandable) to company leaders and government policymakers, implying they are unlikely to deploy or allow deployment of an AI while those problems remain open (i.e., appear unsolved according to the information they have access to). But some problems are illegible (obscure or hard to understand, or in a common cognitive blind spot), meaning there is a high risk that leaders and policymakers will decide to deploy or allow deployment even if they are not solved. (Of course, this is a spectrum, but I am simplifying it to a binary for ease of exposition.) From an x-risk perspective, working on highly legible safety problems has low or even negative expected value. Similar to working on AI capabilities, it brings forward the date by which AGI/ASI will be deployed, leaving less time to solve the illegible x-safety problems. In contrast, working on the illegible problems (including by trying to make them more legible) does not have this issu

Toby_Ord 8mo 11 2 0 That's a very nice and clear idea — I think you're right that working on making mission-critical, but illegible, problems legible is robustly high value. Reply

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