It’s more probable---cognitive bias overrates negative risk.

We believe artificial intelligence technologies should largely be governed by a policy regime of permissionless innovation so that humanity can best extract all of the opportunities and benefits they promise. A precautionary approach could, alternatively, rob us of these life-saving benefits and leave us all much worse off.

The Risk of Avoiding All Risks

Human psychology is such that the precautionary principle often initially seems appealing. We, as a species, are risk averse. People can quite easily conjure a parade of hypothetical horrible situations they believe new technologies will usher into society. Yet imagined best-case scenarios are not as readily apparent to our risk-adverse psyches.

This can ironically render us less safe. "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever," Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote. Of course, captains aim higher and take risks in braving the high seas precisely because progress and prosperityfor both them and society at largedepend upon it.

The same holds true for all new innovations. When we fail to consider the upsides new developments could bring, we can end up doing more harm to ourselves than if we allowed a new technique to continue without burden.

Consider drug regulation. On its face, it seems logical for a pharmaceutical regulator like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to maintain exacting regulations against new medicines until they can be proven almost entirely safe. After all, the risk of dangerous side effects harming or even killing people in the long term is a formidable one indeed.

But what about the people who could be saved by an experimental treatment that is unjustly delayed or prohibited? We don't see these people or their plights as readily, but they are just as real. Because their suffering or death is under the radar, the tragic effects of this kind of error are not accounted for. This was the unfortunate outcome of the FDA's delayed approval of a drug named Misoprostol to treat gastric ulcers in the early 1980s. Their dithering ended up costing up to 15,000 lives.a

Humans are already well aware of the first-order risks of new technologies like AI applications. We fear errors in the opposite direction: that policymakers and the public will underrate the improvements AI can bring, and will allow fears of worst-case scenarios to justify policies that ensure best-case scenarios never come about.