I sent a two-question survey to ~117 people working on long-term AI risk, asking about the level of existential risk from "humanity not doing enough technical AI safety research" and from "AI systems not doing/optimizing what the people deploying them wanted/intended".

44 people responded (~38% response rate). In all cases, these represent the views of specific individuals, not an official view of any organization. Since some people's views may have made them more/less likely to respond, I suggest caution in drawing strong conclusions from the results below. Another reason for caution is that respondents added a lot of caveats to their responses (see the anonymized spreadsheet), $^{1}$ which the aggregate numbers don't capture.

I don’t plan to do any analysis on this data, just share it; anyone who wants to analyze it is of course welcome to.

If you'd like to make your own predictions before seeing the data, I made a separate spoiler-free post for that.

Methods

You can find a copy of the survey here. The main questions (including clarifying notes) were: $^{2}$

1. How likely do you think it is that the overall value of the future will be drastically less than it could have been, as a result of humanity not doing enough technical AI safety research?
2. How likely do you think it is that the overall value of the future will be drastically less than it could have been, as a result of AI systems not doing/optimizing what the people deploying them wanted/intended?
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Note A: "Technical AI safety research" here means good-quality technical research aimed at figuring out how to get highly capable AI systems to produce long-term outcomes that are reliably beneficial.
Note B: The intent of question 1 is something like "How likely is it that our future will be drastically worse than the future of an (otherwise maximally similar) world where we put a huge civilizational effort into technical AI safety?" (For concreteness, we might imagine that human whole-brain emulation tech lets you gather ten thousand well-managed/coordinated top researchers to collaborate on technical AI safety for 200 subjective years well before the advent of AGI; and somehow this tech doesn't cause any other changes to the world.)
The intent of question 1 *isn't* "How likely is it that our future will be astronomically worse than the future of a world where Go

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Surveys