CONCEPT
Appropriate Fear
Jack Clark’s term for the specific register of concern that the AI moment demands: neither panic, which is paralyzing and unproductive, nor the studied calm that passes for sophistication among the technically fluent, but a fear calibrated to the actual magnitude of what is being built and channelled into concrete action.
The word “appropriate” is doing the work in Jack Clark’s phrase, and it is worth unpacking precisely. Clark is not endorsing the free-floating dread that characterises the AI doomer community, which he regards as paralyzing and often disconnected from the actual evidence. He is equally not endorsing the breezy confidence of the boosterist community, which he regards as a failure of intellectual honesty about what the evidence shows. He is arguing for a fear proportionate to the evidence: fear that tracks what careful measurement reveals about the trajectory and capability of the systems, scaled to their actual rather than imagined power. Appropriate fear, in this account, is not the opposite of optimism but its companion: the same evidence that makes him believe the technology will go further than almost anyone expects is the evidence that makes him frightened, because a technology powerful enough to
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