Positive and Negative AI Futures

I'm continuing to share some notes I created for myself to use when I facilitate AI safety courses. I really like using Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world as a way of engaging students at the start of a course. The video primarily focuses on the way that AI could go wrong, however, it also starts with “Now, AI is a great thing…”, so it naturally leads to a discussion of positive and negative futures. Positive Futures: • One obvious resource on positive futures Foresight Institute’s Existential Hope website. I’ve browsed their content in the past, some of it is kind of interesting, but honestly, I found view it as mostly pretty mid. They also run a fellowship which has an existential hope stream:• They recently released The AI future nobody is showing you, which resulted in a wide range of reactions on Twitter. I think this is worth commenting on as it illustrates the challenges with attempting to produce a positive vision. Honestly, I’ve become quite pessimistic here: the gap between what different groups in society want may simply be too wide for it to be possible to find a positive vision that unites society:• Steven Pinker was positive: “A more plausible vision, in my view, than either Utopia or doom.”• Nikola Jurkovic was in the middle: “I admire the effort… but sadly this story falls into the common narrative trap of just assuming that AGI won’t actually be deployed widely.”• @HellenicVibes hated it: “Wow how exciting to have a thousand years under the boot of ‘community leaders,’ ‘impacted minorities,’ and ‘AI auditors!’ I would literally rather be turned into paperclips.”• Would it matter if there doesn’t exist a unifying positive vision? What’s wrong with different people having different visions of a positive future? Well, I wouldn’t say anything is wrong with people having different visions per se, but I suspect it makes navigating the path forward much harder, even if everyone broadly agrees that certain outcomes would be bad.• Whilst Dario wrote M