Book review: Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security, by Roman V. Yampolskiy.
This is a collection of papers, with highly varying topics, quality, and importance.
Many of the papers focus on risks that are specific to superintelligence, some assuming that a single AI will take over the world, and some assuming that there will be many AIs of roughly equal power. Others focus on problems that are associated with current AI programs.
I’ve tried to arrange my comments on individual papers in roughly descending order of how important the papers look for addressing the largest AI-related risks, while also sometimes putting similar topics in one group. The result feels a little more organized than the book, but I worry that the papers are too dissimilar to be usefully grouped. I’ve ignored some of the less important papers.
The book’s attempt at organizing the papers consists of dividing them into “Concerns of Luminaries” and “Responses of Scholars”. Alas, I see few signs that many of the authors are even aware of what the other authors have written, much less that the later papers are attempts at responding to the earlier papers. It looks like the papers are mainly arranged in order of when they were written. There’s a modest cluster of authors who agree enough with Bostrom to constitute a single scientific paradigm, but half the papers demonstrate about as much of a consensus on what topic they’re discussing as I would expect to get from asking medieval peasants about airplane safety.