Concrete AI Safety Problems
This sort of "internal" approach to AI safety, where you attempt to build fundamental limits into the AI itself, seems like it is easily thwarted by someone who intentionally builds an AI without these safety mechanisms. As long as AI is an open technology there will always be some criminals who just want to see the world burn.<p>IMO, a better approach to AI safety research is to focus on securing the first channels that a malicious AI would be likely to exploit. Like spam, and security. Can you make communications spam-resistant? Can you make an unhackable internet service?<p>Those seem hard, but more plausible than the "Watch out for paperclip optimizers" approach to AI safety. It just feels like inventing a way to build a nuclear weapon that can't actually explode, and then hoping the problem of nuclear war is solved.