What are the odds? Risk and uncertainty about AI existential risk
It addresses philosophical and methodological issues in AI existential risk assessment for researchers and policymakers, but is incremental as it builds on existing work.
This commentary critiques a model for assessing AI existential risk, arguing that linear risk models have philosophical limitations and that incorporating dimensions of uncertainty like option and state-space uncertainty improves understanding of the probability of such risks.
This work is a commentary of the article \href{https://doi.org/10.18716/ojs/phai/2025.2801}{AI Survival Stories: a Taxonomic Analysis of AI Existential Risk} by Cappelen, Goldstein, and Hawthorne. It is not just a commentary though, but a useful reminder of the philosophical limitations of \say{linear} models of risk. The article will focus on the model employed by the authors: first, I discuss some differences between standard Swiss Cheese models and this one. I then argue that in a situation of epistemic indifference the probability of P(D) is higher than what one might first suggest, given the structural relationships between layers. I then distinguish between risk and uncertainty, and argue that any estimation of P(D) is structurally affected by two kinds of uncertainty: option uncertainty and state-space uncertainty. Incorporating these dimensions of uncertainty into our qualitative discussion on AI existential risk can provide a better understanding of the likeliness of P(D).