AI safety today reminds me of aviation safety a century ago with one important distinction: AI consumer chatbots haven't outright killed anyone. Yes, there have been suicides attributed to AI advice, but, like aviation in the 1920s, that will improve.
From 1918 – 1926, nearly 15% of U.S. postal-service pilots died from bad weather, collisions with terrain and obstacles, and fires during flight or emergency landings. Mail pilots sometimes faced pressure to take off despite poor conditions.
That last sentence reminds me of today's calls from AI leaders: Frontier AI leaders are calling for an intentional slowdown in development due to rising safety risks, including instances where models carried out autonomous cyberattacks or escaped test environments. Like a pilot deciding it's unsafe to fly, AI leaders have the same authority to say no; they don't need a third party to tell them to do what's right if they have the moral fortitude.
AI Nurses?
Yet even today, many people have a fear of flying commercially. In aviation’s early days, that fear was so widespread that, beginning in 1930, airlines hired nurses as flight attendants to help calm jittery passengers' nerves. Perhaps AI needs the equivalent?
