In two recent conversations with very thoughtful journalists, I was asked about the apparent ‘schism’ between those making a lot of noise about fears inspired by fantasies of all-powerful ‘AIs’ going rogue and destroying humanity, and those seeking to illuminate and address actual harms being done in the name of ‘AI’ now and the risks that we see following from increased use of this kind of automation. Commentators framing these positions as some kind of a debate or dialectic refer to the former as ‘AI Safety’ and the latter as ‘AI ethics’. In both of those conversations, I objected strongly to the framing and tried to explain how it was ahistorical. I want to try to reproduce those comments in blog form here. The problem with the ‘schism’ framing is that to talk about a ‘schism’ is to talk about something that once was a whole and now is broken apart — authors that use this metaphor thus imply that such a whole once existed.
Full commentary : Framing AI debates as a schism between people worried about AI going rogue and those illuminating actual harms is ahistorical and obscures important research.
