A narrow definition of AI safety serves to distract from the vast environmental harms of pouring ever more compute power, energy and water into building data centers big enough to feed this voracious new beast of scale. Debates about whether we can afford to keep scaling AI like this are not happening at any high level — but maybe they should be?
The ushered in spector of AGI also serves to direct the conversation to skip over the myriad legal and ethical issues chain-linked to the development and use of automation tools trained on other people’s information without their permission. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake. Even whole industries. And so are individual people’s rights and freedoms.