Arvind Narayanan

🙏🙏🙏The respect is mutual. A few thoughts on our relationship to AI safety: 1) We don’t see ourselves as adversarial to the community (the sentiment is not always reciprocated but that’s okay!). We care about AI safety, but we disagree on many of the specifics, and we think there’s value in epistemic diversity and in re-examining foundational assumptions and beliefs that the safety community tends to converge on too quickly. 2) We’ve emphasized at every opportunity, including in this essay, that there’s a lot of common ground on policy despite divergence in worldviews. We hope that this can help mitigate the polarization in policy debates that leads to chronic inaction. The fact that we have very different starting assumptions from the safety community is particularly useful in this regard. 3) We’ve spent a lot of time in conversation with the AI safety folks (Sayash is a regular at The Curve, for example) to share our perspective but also to learn and update our beliefs when warranted — something we do in this essay. Much of our empirical research is also about testing the cruxes of disagreement. 4) We don’t identify as part of the safety community but I hope it’s clear that there’s a lot of value in constructive dialog. We know the “normal technology” label irritates a lot of safety people — and I will write about the name at another point, explaining in more detail why we picked it and stand by it — but I think those who engage with our ideas and not just the title will find there’s a lot of common ground on safety!