It’s plausible that there will soon be digital minds that are sentient and deserving of rights. This raises several important issues that we don’t know how to deal with.
See the first five posts of my sequence AI, Alignment, and Ethics for a detailed analysis of exactly this, including:
(Some of the results were quite counterintuitive to me when I first showed them.)
This is a series of posts with lists of projects that it could be valuable for someone to work on. The unifying theme is that they are projects that:
The posts contain some discussion of how important it is to work on these topics, but not a lot. For previous discussion (especially: discussing the objection “Why not leave these issues to future AI systems?”), you can see the section How ITN are these issues? from my previous memo on some neglected topics.
The lists are definitely not exhaustive. Failure to include an idea doesn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t like it. (Similarly, although I’ve made some attempts to link to previous writings when appropriate, I’m sure to have missed a lot of good previous content.)
There’s a lot of variation in how sketched out the projects are. Most of the projects just have some informal notes and would require more thought before someone could start executing. If you're potentially interested in working on any of them and you could benefit from more discussion, I’d be excited if you reached out to me! [2]
There’s also a lot of variation in skills needed for the projects. If you’re looking for projects that are especially suited to your talents, you can search the posts for any of the following tags (including brackets):
[ML] [Empirical research] [Philosophical/conceptual] [survey/interview] [Advocacy] [Governance] [Writing] [Forecasting]
The projects are organized into the following categories (which are in separate posts). Feel free to skip to whatever you’re most interested in.
Few of the ideas in these posts are original to me. I’ve benefited from conversations with many people. Nevertheless, all views are my own.
For some projects, I credit someone who especially contributed to my understanding of the idea. If I do, that doesn’t mean they have read or agree with how I present the idea (I may well have distorted it beyond recognition). If I don’t, I’m still likely to have drawn heavily on discussion with others, and I apologize for any failure to assign appropriate credit.
For general comments and discussion, thanks to Joseph Carlsmith, Paul Christiano, Jesse Clifton, Owen Cotton-Barrat, Holden Karnofsky, Daniel Kokotajlo, Linh Chi Nguyen, Fin Moorhouse, Caspar Oesterheld, and Carl Shulman.