M

mic

1993 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)

Participation
7

  • Completed the Introductory EA Virtual Program
  • Completed the Precipice Reading Group
  • Completed the AGI Safety Fundamentals Virtual Program
  • Attended an EA Global conference
  • Attended an EAGx conference
  • Attended more than three meetings with a local EA group
  • Received career coaching from 80,000 Hours

Comments
291

mic
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Harris was the one personally behind the voluntary AI safety commitments of July 2023. Here's a press release from the White House:

The Vice President’s trip to the United Kingdom builds on her long record of leadership to confront the challenges and seize the opportunities of advanced technology. In May, she convened the CEOs of companies at the forefront of AI innovation, resulting in voluntary commitments from 15 leading AI companies to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology. In July, the Vice President convened consumer protection, labor, and civil rights leaders to discuss the risks related to AI and to underscore that it is a false choice to suggest America can either advance innovation or protect consumers’ rights.

As part of her visit to the United Kingdom, the Vice President is announcing the following initiatives.

  • The United States AI Safety Institute: The Biden-Harris Administration, through the Department of Commerce, is establishing the United States AI Safety Institute (US AISI) inside NIST. ...

See also Foreign Policy's piece Kamala Harris's Record as the Biden Administration's AI Czar

I'm surprised the video doesn't mention cooperative AI and avoiding conflict among transformative AI systems, as this is (apparently) a priority of the Center on Long-Term Risk, one of the main s-risk organizations. See Cooperation, Conflict, and Transformative Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda for more details.

mic
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I wouldn't consider factory farming to be an instance of astronomical suffering, as bad as the practice is, since I don't think the suffering from one century of factory farming exceeds hundreds of millions of years of wild animal suffering. However, perhaps it could be an s-risk if factory farming somehow continues for a billion years. For reference, here is definition of s-risk from a talk by CLR in 2017:

“S-risk – One where an adverse outcome would bring about severe suffering on a cosmic scale, vastly exceeding all suffering that has existed on Earth so far.”

Great to see this! One quick piece of feedback: It takes a while to see a response from the chatbot. Are you planning on streaming text responses in the future?

I think another promising intervention would be to persuade God to be a conditional annihilationist or support universal reconciliation with Christ. Abraham successfully negotiated conditions with God regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with just a few sentences. Imagine what we could do with rigorous and prayerful BOTEC analyses! Even if there is a small chance of this succeeding, the impact could be incredible in expectation.

Are there any readings about how a long reflection could be realistically and concretely achieved?

mic
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Great post! I've written a paper along similar lines for the SERI Conference in April 2023 here, titled "AI Alignment Is Not Enough to Make the Future Go Well." Here is the abstract:

AI alignment is commonly explained as aligning advanced AI systems with human values. Especially when combined with the idea that AI systems aim to optimize their world based on their goals, this has led to the belief that solving the problem of AI alignment will pave the way for an excellent future. However, this common definition of AI alignment is somewhat idealistic and misleading, as the majority of alignment research for cutting-edge systems is focused on aligning AI with task preferences (training AIs to solve user-provided tasks in a helpful manner), as well as reducing the risk that the AI would have the goal of causing catastrophe.

We can conceptualize three different targets of alignment: alignment to task preferences, human values, or idealized values.

Extrapolating from the deployment of advanced systems such as GPT-4 and from studying economic incentives, we can expect AIs aligned with task preferences to be the dominant form of aligned AIs by default.

Aligning AI to task preferences will not by itself solve major problems for the long-term future. Among other problems, these include moral progress, existential security, wild animal suffering, the well-being of digital minds, risks of catastrophic conflict, and optimizing for ideal values. Additional efforts are necessary to motivate society to have the capacity and will to solve these problems.

I don't necessarily think of humans as maximizing economic consumption, but I argue that power-seeking entities (e.g., some corporations or hegemonic governments using AIs) will have predominant influence, and these will not have altruistic goals to optimize for impartial value, by default.

mic
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Congrats on launching GWWC Local Groups! Community building infrastructure can be hard to set up, so I appreciate the work here.

It would be bad to create significant public pressure for a pause through advocacy, because this would cause relevant actors (particularly AGI labs) to spend their effort on looking good to the public, rather than doing what is actually good.

I think I can reasonably model the safety teams at AGI labs as genuinely trying to do good. But I don't know that the AGI labs as organizations are best modeled as trying to do good, rather than optimizing for objectives like outperforming competitors, attracting investment, and advancing exciting capabilities – subject to some safety-related concerns from leadership. That said, public pressure could manifest itself in a variety of ways, some of which might work toward more or less productive goals.

I agree that conditional pauses better than unconditional pauses, due to pragmatic factors. But I worry about AGI labs specification gaming their way through dangerous-capability evaluations, using brittle band-aid fixes that don't meaningfully contribute to safety.

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