Legal and Governance Professionals Are Hungry for AI Safety Knowledge
What I learnt co-leading an AI Safety bootcamp for legal and governance practit
A five-day bootcamp in East Sussex brought together 19 senior legal, governance, and risk professionals from 12 jurisdictions to learn about frontier AI. The author, who co-led the program, shares key insights: these professionals often feel isolated in their concerns about AI safety, they are already reading technical research but lack interpretative frameworks, and they have an insatiable appetite for understanding the technology they oversee. The bootcamp highlighted that legal and governance practitioners deeply value technical safety expertise and that market incentives for AI safety are a neglected lever.
Thank you for this. I have found my people.
- brunohaid
Kinda agreeing with most other highly critical comments. It's a weird insular subculture indeed, Trashfuture this week had a great summarization:
"Bizarre hypotheticals, the power fantasies, the sex life that's one step shy of the angry pirate. [It's like] a bunch of 12 year old school shooters got Tom Hanks Big'd into adults, and they've infiltrated governing the thing that's supposed to solve all the problems in the world and replace the economy.
...and then never doing anything or learning anything, its posting posting posting, while they don't understand computers, or the security problems they fantasize about. And its foisted upon and pitched to us that the computer is only understandable as a magical god, because for Eliezer Yudkowsky it actually is."
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcPR6rde1GQ or
- https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/last-days-of-17089...
- gausswho
> The market should be choosing not the most capable models, but the partners with the strongest incentives towards safety, and only a community with this knowledge can spread that.
Read strictly, author is claiming that only ML4Good or equivalent has the knowledge to dictate what models we should be using. I categorically disagree. Or rather, "they're not even wrong", since "AI safety" is not even remotely encapsulated in this piece.
At the risk of ad hominem, this is an Accenture consultant expanding the definitions for their own ends. Maybe they'll define what "good" is. Someday.
We've seen this wave before with big A Agile consultants, Microsoft certification hucksters, and different hucksters from before my time.
It's a verbose (probably AI written?) piece. I gave it the charitable good-faith read. But in the end, I couldn't shake the feeling that even amongst the welcome humanizing of the concepts, this is the same kind of amorphous know-better-than-you self-promotion, opportunistically hitching their own trailer of grift to the buzzword of the day.
- kingcauchy
link in the comments of the article is also interesting https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bfwH88cFEm3r7PWfv/what-lawye...