Doom as a bad method not a utopia trade-off — LessWrong
Advanced AI is generally expected to have some very high variance outcomes—it might herald everything good, it might destroy humanity. For instance, here are 800 random AI researchers’ expectations about how good the future is, lined up: From my 2023 survey As you can see, most AI researchers put a serious chunk of probability on very different overall outcomes: maybe doom, maybe utopia. This is common. Most people I know who think there is a serious chance of the destruction of humanity from AI also believe that if humanity isn’t destroyed, things might be insanely good. I often hear people talk as if this means we are in a trade-off where the question is whether the good outweighs the bad. For instance, they look at the people above who think there’s a 10% chance of extinction and a 30% chance of utopia and round this off to ‘net positive on AI’. That seems like a kind of wild error. Like considering yourself optimistic regarding driving at 200mph to your new job if you think there’s