AI Vignettes Project

Posted Oct 12 2021

The AI Vignettes Project is an ongoing effort to write concrete plausible future histories of AI development and its social impacts.

Details

Purposes

We hope to:

  • Check that abstract views about the future of AI have plausible concrete instantiations. (Especially, hypothesized extinction scenarios, and proposed safe scenarios.)
  • Develop better intuitions about possible scenarios by thinking through them concretely.
  • Notice recurring themes in concrete stories, that may be worth thinking about more broadly.
  • Fill out the space of plausible feasible scenarios with concrete illustrations, to decrease bias in thinking about the future.
  • Keep a collection of AI vignettes for others to use, in the above or other ways.

Methods

Our current intended method is:

  1. Write draft vignettes, with no particular systematic method for choosing an unbiased selection of scenarios
  2. Request comments on their realism
  3. Modify according to comments
  4. Repeat 2-3 until realism critiques subside

Work so far

AI Impacts has run two small workshops where participants wrote AI vignettes.

Vignette collection

This is a subset of vignettes arising from this project, or similar.

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