Prevent sign flip and other near misses
The problem that we have with one proposed solution (adding a dummy utility function that highly disvalues a specific non-suffering thing) is that the resulting utility function is not reflectively stable.
So a theory of value formation and especially on achieving vNM coherence (or achieving whatever framework for rational preferences turns out to be the "correct" one) would be useful here. Then during the process of value formation humans can supervise decision points (i.e., in which direction to resolve the preference).
Many kinds of work one could do to make AI go better and a grab-bag of other career considerations
I recently found myself confused about what I’d like to work on. So, I made an overview with the possible options for what to work on to make AI go well. I thought I’d share it in case it’s helpful for other people. Since I made this overview for my own career deliberations, it is tailored for myself and not necessarily complete. That said, I tried to be roughly comprehensive, so feel free to point out options I’m missing. I redacted some things but didn’t edit the doc in other ways to make it more comprehensible to others. In case you’re interested, I explain a lot of the areas in the “Humans in control” and the “Misalignment” worlds here and to some extent here.
What areas could one work on? What endpoints or intermediary points could one aim for?
Note that I redacted a bunch of names in “Who’s working on this” just because I didn’t want to bother asking them and I wasn’t sure they had publicly talked about it yet, not because of anything else.
“?” behind a name or org means I don’t know if they actually work on the thing (but you could probably find out with a quick google!)
ASI governance | human-control
Acausal interactions | human-control
Acausal interactions | misalignment
Main- stream AI safety best thing to work on
For some of these: Would success be net good or net bad?
If good: How good?
How high is the penalty for being less neglected?
Alignment (more comprehensive overview):
What types of work are there?
Research or otherwise being a thinker,
Varying in my position in the research pipeline from foundational to strategizing about how to get things done
Setting policy
“Normal”, outside of EA world
Opinion making, lobbying and advocacy
Leveraging social skills outside of EA world
Appendix: Other considerations that go into thinking about my career
Here are other things that I’m thinking about for my career deliberations. I’m also still in the middle of figuring stuff out, so this is “The first part of my career deliberation seems maybe useful to others. I’ll also share the second half just in case” and not “Here is my complete career deliberation template that I found to work.” Note that I’m basically just listing considerations and possible approaches to take into account. The actual thinking about which ones are most important to you likely will need additional free-form space. I’d encourage you to share your approaches if you think it might be useful to others!
How do I want to approach choosing my (next) work?
On the meta level, what is my priority for my next work?
How important are different properties of work to me?
My personal career doc ends with a “Next steps” section that I’m not including. It’s a mix of talking to specific people and thinking for myself to resolve object-level uncertainties, uncertainties about what different kinds of work are like, and learning which heuristics for choosing work (steps) people I admire use.