So here's my memory of the history of this discourse. Please know that I haven't been a highly engaged member of this community for very long and this is all from memory/is just my perspective.
About 10 or 15 years ago, people debated AI boxing. Eliezer Yudkowsky was of course highly prominent in this debate, and his position has always been that AGI is uncontainable. He also believes in a very fast take off, so he does not think that we will have much experience with weak AGIs before ruin happens. To prove his point, he engaged in a secret role playing game played with others on LW, where he took on the role of an AI and another player took on the role of a human trying to keep the AI boxed. The game was played twice, for betting money (which I believe was donated to charity). EY won both times by somehow persuading the other player to let him out of the box. EY insisted that the actual dialog of the game be kept secret.
After that, the community mostly stopped talking about boxing, and no one pushed for the position that AI labs like OpenAI or DeepMind should keep their AIs in a box. It's just not something anyone is advocating for. You're certainly welcome to reopen this and make a push for boxing, if you think it has some merit. Check out the AI Boxing tag on LW to learn more. (In my view, this community is too dismissive of partial solutions, and we should be more open to the Swiss Cheese Model since we don't have the ultimate solution to the problem.)
The consequence is that the big AI labs, who do at least pay lip service to AI safety, are under no community pressure to do any kind of containment. Recently, OpenAI experimented with an AI that had complete web access. Other groups have experimented with AIs that access the bash shell. If AI boxing was a safety approach that the community advocated for, then we would be pressuring labs to stop this kind of research or at least be open about their security measures (i.e. always running in a VM, can only make GET requests, here's how we know that it can't leak out, etc)
tl;dr: Ask questions about AGI Safety as comments on this post, including ones you might otherwise worry seem dumb!
Asking beginner-level questions can be intimidating, but everyone starts out not knowing anything. If we want more people in the world who understand AGI safety, we need a place where it's accepted and encouraged to ask about the basics.
We'll be putting up monthly FAQ posts as a safe space for people to ask all the possibly-dumb questions that may have been bothering them about the whole AGI Safety discussion, but which until now they didn't feel able to ask.
It's okay to ask uninformed questions, and not worry about having done a careful search before asking.
Stampy's Interactive AGI Safety FAQ
Additionally, this will serve as a way to spread the project Rob Miles' volunteer team[1] has been working on: Stampy - which will be (once we've got considerably more content) a single point of access into AGI Safety, in the form of a comprehensive interactive FAQ with lots of links to the ecosystem. We'll be using questions and answers from this thread for Stampy (under these copyright rules), so please only post if you're okay with that! You can help by adding other people's questions and answers to Stampy or getting involved in other ways!
We're not at the "send this to all your friends" stage yet, we're just ready to onboard a bunch of editors who will help us get to that stage :)
stamp maximizationAGI Safety!We welcome feedback[2] and questions on the UI/UX, policies, etc. around Stampy, as well as pull requests to his codebase.[3] You are encouraged to add other people's answers from this thread to Stampy if you think they're good, and collaboratively improve the content that's already on our wiki.
We've got a lot more to write before he's ready for prime time, but we think Stampy can become an excellent resource for everyone from skeptical newcomers, through people who want to learn more, right up to people who are convinced and want to know how they can best help with their skillsets.
PS: Since the last thread, we've got feedback that Stampy will be not serious enough for serious people, which seems true, so we're working on an alternate skin for the frontend which is more professional.
Guidelines for Questioners:
Guidelines for Answerers:
Finally: Please think very carefully before downvoting any questions, remember this is the place to ask stupid questions!
If you'd like to join, head over to Rob's Discord and introduce yourself!
Via the feedback form.
Stampy is a he, we asked him.