On his recent interview with FLI, Andrew Critch talks about overlaps between AI safety and current issues, and the difference between AI safety and existential safety/risk. Many (but not all) AI safety issues are relevant to current systems, so people who care about x-risks could focus on safety issues that are novel to advanced systems.

If you take a random excerpt of any page from [Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests] and pretend that it’s about the Netflix challenge or building really good personal assistants or domestic robots, you can succeed. That’s not a critique. That’s just a good property of integrating with research trends. But it’s not about the concept of existential risk. Same thing with Concrete Problems in AI Safety.

In fact, it’s a fun exercise to do. Take that paper. Pretend you think existential risk is ridiculous and read Concrete Problems in AI Safety. It reads perfectly as you don’t need to think about that crazy stuff, let’s talk about tipping over vases or whatever. And that’s a sign that it’s an approach to safety that it’s going to be agreeable to people, whether they care about x-risk or not...

...So here’s a problem we have. And when I say we, I mean people who care about AI existential safety. Around 2015 and 2016, we had this coming out of AI safety as a concept. Thanks to Amodei and the Robust and Beneficial AI Agenda from Stuart Russell, talking about safety became normal. Which was hard to accomplish before 2018. That was a huge accomplishment.

And so what we had happen is people who cared about extinction risk from artificial intelligence would use AI safety as a euphemism for preventing human extinction risk. Now, I’m not sure that was a mistake, because as I said, prior to 2018, it was hard to talk about negative outcomes at all. But it’s at this time in 2020 a real problem that you have people … When they’re thinking existential safety, they’re saying safety, they’re saying AI safety. And that leads to sentences like, “Well, self driving car navigation is not really AI safety.” I’ve heard that uttered many times by different people.

Lucas Perry: And that’s really confusing.

Andrew Critch: Right. And it’s like, “Well, what is AI safety, exactly, if cars driven by AI, not crashing, doesn’t count as AI safety?” I think that as described, the concept of safety usually means minimizing acute risks. Acute meaning in space and time. Like there’s a thing that happens in a place that causes a bad thing. And you’re trying to stop that. And the Concrete Problems in AI Safety agenda really nailed that concept.

A few other resources about bridging the long-term and near-term divide:

• Bridging near- and long-term concerns about AI, Cave and ÓhÉigeartaigh 2019
• Reconciliation between Factions Focused on Near-Term and Long-Term Artificial Intelligence, Baum 2017
• ICLR Safe ML workshop report
• Aligning Recommender Systems as Cause Area

If I were to try to convince someone to work on AI safety without convincing them that AGI will happen this century, I'd say things like:

1. While it may not happen this century, it might.
2. While it may not happen this century, it'll probably happen eventually.
3. It's extremely important; it's an x-risk.
4. We are currently woefully underprepared for it.
5. It's going to take a lot of research and policy work to plan for it, work which won't be done by default.
6. Currently very few people are doing this work (e.g. there's more academic papers published on dung beetles than human extinction, AI risk is even more niche, etc. etc. (I may be remembering the example wrong))
7. There are other big problems, like climate change, nuclear war, etc. but these are both less likely to cause x-risk and also much less neglected.