Is AI Safety a Pascal's Mugging?

I love the idea of a project manager for a bridge saying "I think this is a Pascal's mugging".

"What if the bridge has a small chance of catastrophic failure that can only be prevented by not looking at the schematic?"

Let's design an AI to predict if AI will go really really wrong or not.

From now on, whenever one of my colleagues raises concern about some fringe-case risk in our project, I'll just be like "That sounds like a Pascal's mugging." I won't be right, but it will definitely stumble them enough that I appear smart to any bystanders.

"So you can solve a lot of these problems by inventing Gods arbitrarily" I think a lot of people in the past have had similar such ideas.

"So uh... Give me your wallet" I see you have done this internet thing before

12:31 "It can be tricky and involved. It requires some thought. But it has the advantage of being the only thing that has any chance of actually getting the right answer." This sums up science/the scientific method to me so beautifully. Thank you for your channel sir.

“It seems like the kind of clean abstract reasoning that you’re supposed to do...” I like this sentence a lot. You did a great job of making an argument that can seem trivial, substantial. Great vid.

I've heard a lot of discussion about Pascal's wager, but never Pascal's mugging. Thanks for the interesting topic, keep up the good work!

She's omnipresent obviously but she lives in Canada lol

"take the God down flip it and reverse it" So nobody is going to talk about that Missy Elliot reference?

Isn't every Nigerian scammer e-mail really a form of Pascal's mugging?

"She goes to a different school" brilliant hahahaha

Being tortured for "Two times Infinity" may have the same duration as 'Infinity' but probably involves twice the number of pitchforks.

As a Christian, I really appreciate your explanation of Pascal's wager. I've always been uncomfortable with it as an over riding philosophy.

Have you considered making more videos on philosophy? This is gold

If I weren't already convinced, you'd have won me over with this. My take on Pascal's Wager is that if God does exist and if he's even a fraction as goddish as theologians and devotees say, then he is going to see through my pretending to believe in him because I am gambling on the payoff for that being better than if I act with my actual beliefs.

4:18 "all right, next two" LOL

"What if we consider the possibility that there's another opposite design flaw in the bridge, which might cause it to collapse unless we don't spend extra time evaluating the safety of the design?" had me laughing so hard

Very interesting, but one significant difference between AI safety and civil engineering safety is that civil engineering safety is based upon an understanding of historic failures, yet to date we do not have a substantial history of AI failures to work with. In the absence of any historic data it is almost impossible to asses meaningful probabilities to theoretical scenarios. This is not to argue that research is the field is meaningless, only that it cannot be grounded in historic understanding and so it will inevitably be poorly focused (i.e. you cannot say this is where we need to focus our resources because we have historic experience to say it is where we will get the best return on those resources). Given that resources are always finite, and resources spent on unfocused AI safety research has to compete for those finite resources with more focused safety research on civil engineering, aviation, etc.; then it is understandable if higher priority might be given to the more focussed research.