Altruists should prioritize artificial intelligence

Abstract

The large-scale adoption of today’s cutting-edge AI technologies across different industries would already prove transformative for human society. And AI research rapidly progresses further towards the goal of general intelligence. Once created, we can expect smarter-than-human artificial intelligence (AI) to not only be transformative for the world, but also (plausibly) to be better than humans at self-preservation and goal preservation. This makes it particularly attractive, from the perspective of those who care about improving the quality of the future, to focus on affecting the development goals of such AI systems, as well as to install potential safety precautions against likely failure modes. Some experts emphasize that steering the development of smarter-than-human AI into beneficial directions is important because it could make the difference between human extinction and a utopian future. But because we cannot confidently rule out the possibility that some AI scenarios will go badly and also result in large amounts of suffering, thinking about the impacts of AI is paramount for both suffering-focused altruists as well as those focused on actualizing the upsides of the very best futures.