Reviewing my 2017 AI Risk Project

In 2017, after getting laid off from a startup, I spent a while looking into AI risk: Many people I respect have started to think that AI risk is the most valuable place to focus EA efforts. For example, 80000 Hours ranks it first on their "list of global issues", taking into account "scale, neglectedness, and solvability". On the other hand, I have a lot of friends working in machine learning, and none of them think AI risk is worth working on now. This level of disagreement is very strange, and kind of worrying. After playing for a dance weekend in South Carolina where casual conversation among non-tech people included earnest speculation over the likelihood that AI gets us all killed, I thought it might be a good time to look back at when this was really speculative. Summary: I talked to the right people, heard some incredibly prescient ideas, and got the bottom line wrong. I do a lot of my thinking via serial writing, and in this case that was a series of twelve blog posts. Taking…