====== AI Vignettes Project ======
// Published 12 October, 2021; last updated 06 August, 2022 //
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:
Write draft vignettes, with no particular systematic method for choosing an unbiased selection of scenarios
Request comments on their realism
Modify according to comments
Repeat 2-3 until realism critiques subside
==== Work so far ====
AI Impacts has run two small workshops where participants wrote AI vignettes.
==== Vignette collection ====
A subset of vignettes arising from this project can be found among [[featured_articles:fiction_relevant_to_ai_futurism|fiction relevant to AI futurism]].