Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
TL;DR: EA has traditionally deprioritized climate change as a cause area. But a new report from Rethink Priorities, an EA research institute, suggests that specific Earth systems risks driven by climate change could have mortality impacts comparable to major global health burdens, on top of the known damages of climate change.
The report finds that research and governance work on ‘Earth Systems Stabilization’ to establish whether safe options to address th...
Thanks for posting this question. I'll take a stab at it.
Yes, any use of AI that aims to improve society counts as AI for social good.
It's hard to know because this question is so broad - one could spend their entire life investigating it. It would be helpful to narrow down your question into something more specific, like "the projected future impact of agricultural applications of robotics on human well-being". Then you could divide agricultural applications of robotics into different use cases and predict how each use case would affect the outcome you're interested in (in this case, well-being) and how much. Also, the counterfactual impact of an individual new technology (such as robotics) is hard to isolate, because technologies are very often used together in different combinations (such as robotics + computer vision + hardware accelerators for AI + ...), and because technologies interact with other technologies and other social systems in complex ways.
Once you've narrowed down to a more specific question, you've got something you could do an entire year-long research project on. We wouldn't be able to answer your research question on the EA Forum overnight, although we may be able to point you to relevant resources if you ask a specific question.
Finally, a shameless plug: if you're interested in using AI to improve the world as effectively as possible, I invite you to join my Slack.
I hope this helps!
Also, for questions on the EA Forum, I recommend writing a short title and a longer description if needed. The current title of this post doesn't fit on the front page, so it's hard to know what your question is about before clicking on it.
Here may be a better question: Would you estimate that robotics is a good field to go into for for profit entrepreneurship that tries to make a direct impact?
Any resources from the previous questions would also be helpful, thank you!