Lists cut from our main post, in a token gesture toward readability.
We list past reviews of alignment work, ideas which seem to be dead, the cool but neglected neuroscience / biology approach, various orgs which don't seem to have any agenda, and a bunch of things which don't fit elsewhere.
Lots of agendas but not clear if anyone besides Byrnes and Thiergart are actively turning the crank. Seems like it would need a billion dollars.
Human enhancement
One-sentence summary: maybe we can give people new sensory modalities, or much higher bandwidth for conceptual information, or much better idea generation, or direct interface with DL systems, or direct interface with sensors, or transfer learning, and maybe this would help. The old superbaby dream goes here I suppose.
Theory of change: maybe this makes us better at alignment research
Merging
One-sentence summary: maybe we can form networked societies of DL systems and brains
Theory of change: maybe this lets us preserve some human values through bargaining or voting or weird politics.
One-sentence summary: maybe we can get really high-quality alignment labels from brain data, maybe we can steer models by training humans to do activation engineering fast and intuitively, maybe we can crack the true human reward function / social instincts and maybe adapt some of them for AGI.
Theory of change: as you’d guess
Some names: Byrnes, Cvitkovic, Foresight’s BCI, Also (list from Byrnes): Eli Sennesh, Adam Safron, Seth Herd, Nathan Helm-Burger, Jon Garcia, Patrick Butlin
Appendix: Research support orgs
One slightly confusing class of org is described by the sample {CAIF, FLI}. Often run by active researchers with serious alignment experience, but usually not following an obvious agenda, delegating a basket of strategies to grantees, doing field-building stuff like NeurIPS workshops and summer schools.
One-sentence summary: support researchers making differential progress in cooperative AI (eg precommitment mechanisms that can’t be used to make threats)
ARAAC - Make RL agents that can justify themselves (or other agents with their code as input) in human language at various levels of abstraction (AI apology, explainable RL for broad XAI)
CAIS: Machine ethics - Model intrinsic goods and normative factors, vs mere task preferences, as these will be relevant even under extreme world changes; helps us avoid proxy misspecification as well as value lock-in. Present state of research unknown (some relevant bits in RepEng).
CAIS: Power Aversion - incentives to models to avoid gaining more power than necessary. Related to mild optimisation and powerseeking. Present state of research unknown.
Honestly this isn't that long, I might say to re-merge it with the main post. Normally I'm a huge proponent of breaking posts up smaller, but yours is literally trying to be an index, so breaking a piece off makes it harder to use.
For what it’s worth, I am not doing (and have never done) any research remotely similar to your text “maybe we can get really high-quality alignment labels from brain data, maybe we can steer models by training humans to do activation engineering fast and intuitively”.
I have a concise and self-contained summary of my main research project here (Section 2).
Lists cut from our main post, in a token gesture toward readability.
We list past reviews of alignment work, ideas which seem to be dead, the cool but neglected neuroscience / biology approach, various orgs which don't seem to have any agenda, and a bunch of things which don't fit elsewhere.
Appendix: Prior enumerations
Appendix: Graveyard
Appendix: Biology for AI alignment
Lots of agendas but not clear if anyone besides Byrnes and Thiergart are actively turning the crank. Seems like it would need a billion dollars.
Human enhancement
Merging
As alignment aid
Appendix: Research support orgs
One slightly confusing class of org is described by the sample {CAIF, FLI}. Often run by active researchers with serious alignment experience, but usually not following an obvious agenda, delegating a basket of strategies to grantees, doing field-building stuff like NeurIPS workshops and summer schools.
CAIF
AISC
See also:
Appendix: Meta, mysteries, more