> We contacted approximately 4271 researchers who published at the conferences NeurIPS or ICML in 2021... we found email addresses in papers published at those conferences, in other public data, and in records from our previous survey and Zhang et al 2022. We received 738 responses, some partial, for a 17% response rate.Anyone who has reviewed for, or attended, or just read the author lists of ICML/NeurIPS papers is LOLing right now. Being on the author list of an ICML/NeurIPS paper does not an expert make.
Anyone who has tried to get a professor or senior researcher to answer an email -- let alone open an unsolicited email and take a long ass survey -- is laughing even harder.
I think their methodology almost certainly over-sampled people with low experience and high exuberance (ie, VERY young scientists still at the beginning of their training period and with very little technical or life experience). You would expect this population, if you have spent any time in a PhD student lounge or bar near a conference, to RADICALLY over-estimate technological advancement.
But even within that sample:
> The median respondent believes the probability that the long-run effect of advanced AI on humanity will be “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)” is 5%.
Ie even lower than my guess of 90% above.
Anyone who has reviewed for, or attended, or just read the author lists of ICML/NeurIPS papers is LOLing right now. Being on the author list of an ICML/NeurIPS paper does not an expert make.
Anyone who has tried to get a professor or senior researcher to answer an email -- let alone open an unsolicited email and take a long ass survey -- is laughing even harder.
I think their methodology almost certainly over-sampled people with low experience and high exuberance (ie, VERY young scientists still at the beginning of their training period and with very little technical or life experience). You would expect this population, if you have spent any time in a PhD student lounge or bar near a conference, to RADICALLY over-estimate technological advancement.
But even within that sample:
> The median respondent believes the probability that the long-run effect of advanced AI on humanity will be “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)” is 5%.
Ie even lower than my guess of 90% above.