Inside the mindset of AI safety workers

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Meghann McCarty-Corino (1:05)

An anthropological study of the ways of AI workers. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghann McCarty-Corino.

In recent weeks, we've been hearing a lot about the threat of out-of-control AI, mostly from the people making the technology. There was the anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, who publicly quit and kicked off the whole discussion. Others, including CEO Dario Amodei, chimed in with alarming appraisals of AI's existential risk.

Making sense of all this as an outsider can sometimes feel like decoding an unfamiliar civilization. So we called an anthropologist to help explain. Spencer Kaplan is a PhD candidate at Yale who researches AI workers.

Spencer Kaplan (2:03)

From my anthropological research among AI researchers, I lived in San Francisco for two years embedded in their communities. Quite a good amount of them do seriously believe in these kinds of projections about the future, and they're shaping their lives today in response to it in very significant ways. So they're sharing things like how they're not saving as much money as they would, or they're not opening 401Ks because they do think that AI in the near future will change things so much that those kinds of activities wouldn't be as relevant in the present.

Meghann McCarty-Corino (2:41)

Yeah, I guess if this is a sincerely held belief, I think for most people the question that naturally follows is, why are you working on this technology at all? Why aren't you all quitting like Jacob Coxon?

Spencer Kaplan (2:52)

Right. That's the central question, and it's one that they're asking and debating with one another. So one of the guiding values that I've seen in my research is that, as a researcher or as a technologist in the Bay Area, it's important to be what they call agentic, and to have high agency, and to use whatever resources you have at hand, the position that you have, in order to make the most positive impact on society.

The way that they do that is by thinking about through all their options, and the magnitude of the effects, and the likelihood of the effects that those options would have, and then picking the one with the highest expected value. There are those like Jacob Coxon who have left, and in a rather public way, in order to make an impact on the public conversation, on politics, on industry regulation, whereas others have chosen to stay for various reasons.

Meghann McCarty-Corino (3:47)

I want to dig a little bit deeper into sort of like the intellectual milieu of the AI industry. Tell me a little bit more about, you know, what that scene looks like. There's a lot of, you know, young researchers, they're living in often group houses, and spending a lot of their time either online or, you know, with their friends and colleagues, like talking about these big philosophical ideas. Like, tell me more about what that looks like.

Spencer Kaplan (4:17)

Yeah, so during my two years of field work with AI researchers embedded in their community, I spent time online on the sites that they're spending their time. I visited the group houses that many of them are living in. I went to the parties that they were going to. And just my overall impression of it, from all that time spent with them, is that, first of all, it's an extremely intellectual community.

Other sorts of social events that I joined them at are included reading groups, for example, or salon discussions where we would all sit down and talk about a topic related to AI in the future. And the conversations are almost always going to what the future of humanity might be as a result of AI systems that develop over the next few years.