Roman Yampolskiy: belief

Transcript context

…So, if you look at just humanity as a set of machines, is the machinery of AI safety conflicting with the machinery of capitalism. I think we can generalize it to just prisoners’ dilemma in general. Personal self-interest versus group interest. The incentives are such that everyone wants what’s best for them. Capitalism obviously has that tendency to maximize your personal gain, which does create this race to the bottom. I don’t have to be a lot better than you, but if I’m 1% better than you, I’ll capture more of the profits, so it’s worth for me personally to take the risk even if society as a whole will suffer as a result. But capitalism has created a lot of good in this world. It’s not clear to me that AI safety is not aligned with the function of capitalism, unless AI safety is so difficult that it requires the complete halt of the development, which is also a possibility. It just feels like building safe systems should be the desirable thing to do for tech companies.…

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