Sam Altman says subtle, widespread harms from AI worry him more than catastrophic events. He points to TikTok's effect on attention spans as an example of the kind of low-level damage that's easy to miss because nobody sees it coming. Both risks matter, but the hidden ones are harder to plan for.
A big focus on Stanford right now is ethics. And can we talk about how you perceive the dangers of AGI? And specifically, do you think the biggest danger from AGI is going to come from a cataclysmic event which makes all the papers, or is it going to be more subtle and pernicious, like how everybody has ADD right now from using TikTok? Are you more concerned about the subtle dangers or the cataclysmic dangers or neither?
I'm more concerned about the subtle dangers because I think we're more likely to overlook those. The cataclysmic dangers a lot of people talk about and a lot of people think about, and I don't want to minimize those. I think they're really serious and a real thing, but I think we at least know to look out for that and spend a lot of effort. The example you gave of everybody getting ADD from TikTok or whatever, I don't think we knew to look out for. And that's a really hard. The unknown. Unknowns are really hard. And so I'd worry more about those, although I worry about both.
And are they unknown unknowns? Are there any that you can name that you're particularly worried about?
Well, then I would kind of. They'd be a known unknown. I am worried just about. So even though I think in the short term things change less than we think, as with other major technologies, in the long term I think they change more than we think. And I am worried about what rate society can adapt to something so new and how long it'll take us to figure out the new social contract versus how long we get to do it. I'm worried about that.
