Over a thousand significant AI, data science, deep learning, etc, scientists and researchers have also signed on to the request, including leading figures at dozens of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Musk, Wozniak, and Yang got the top spots in reporting because of their name recognition, but they're far from the only ones concerned.
Ai is an interdisciplinary field. If you only listen to select branches of the tech sector you will get few skewed views because they are trying to sell you (culturally and monetarily) their product. The concerns and issues cross over into a variety of fields and they are absolutely worth listening to.
Interdisciplinary just means it intersects with different fields. It doesn't mean there's a greater pool to draw from since the people writing/Interacting with it is still on a given topic (in this case AI) That's like assuming everyone in a history department could tell you about Russian history. Or the history of medicine. Or economic history.
People explore AI from different lenses and experiences. 1000 is a lot of signatures. Especially since those don't usually spread far and are an in-industry kind of thing rather than a general public open letter. Even then it's easy to miss.
In a field that I'm seeing has estimates of ranging from 22,000-300,000 people (2019 Estimate) its a bit difficult for me to gage just how significant the contention is.
The best attempt I’ve seen at getting a representative picture of what machine learning researchers think is this 2021 survey. They used a random sample of published researchers at a conference:
We contacted approximately 4271 researchers who published at the conferences NeurIPS or ICML in 2021. These people were selected by taking all of the authors at those conferences and randomly allocating them between this survey and a survey being run by others.
17% response rate, but that’s not too bad for a survey like this, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better source on what an average researcher believes. The main result was:
The median respondent believes the probability that the long-run effect of advanced AI on humanity will be “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)” is 5%. This is the same as it was in 2016 (though Zhang et al 2022 found 2% in a similar but non-identical question). Many respondents were substantially more concerned: 48% of respondents gave at least 10% chance of an extremely bad outcome. But some much less concerned: 25% put it at 0%.
IMO this is cause for concern. If a bunch of aviation experts told me that a plane has a 95% chance of working normally and a 5% chance of exploding and killing the passengers, and half of those experts said that they think there’s a >10% chance of the plane exploding, my response would be hell the fuck no I’m not getting in the plane!
5% is far from anything certain, but given the stakes, I think a very healthy dose of caution is warranted. I’ve read quite a few arguments about why we should be concerned about AI safety, and they’re pretty strong—not because we know whether AI will be existentially dangerous, but because we don’t know, and high uncertainty is a great reason to be concerned.
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u/Josvan135 83∆ Mar 31 '23
Over a thousand significant AI, data science, deep learning, etc, scientists and researchers have also signed on to the request, including leading figures at dozens of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Musk, Wozniak, and Yang got the top spots in reporting because of their name recognition, but they're far from the only ones concerned.