I've given a lightning talk twice now about "why should we care about adversarial examples?", highlighting the distinction (which ML experts are usually aware of, but media and policy folks often miss) between an unsolved research problem and a real-world threat model.

I've now published a version of this as a general-audience Medium post.

For a LessWrong / Alignment Forum audience, I'll highlight the fact that I'm directly and consciously drawing on the "intellectual puzzle" vs. "instrumental strategy" framing from Abram Demski's Embedded Curiosities post (at the conclusion of the Embedded Agency series).

I'm mostly making an observation at the level of "how a research field works", and find it interesting that agent foundations and adversarial examples research are both hitting similar confusions when justifying the importance of their work.

I also think a lot more could be said and explored on the object-level about which angles on "adversarial examples" are likely to yield valuable insights in the long run, and which are dead ends. But this post isn't really about that.