Crossposted from the EA Forum TL;DR A nonpartisan group like No Labels could privately offer US congresspeople this deal: If enough congresspeople pledge to the deal, they all agree to switch their Presidential endorsement to a compromise candidate. If not enough pledge, then pledging still gets them some other benefit,...
From a consequentialist perspective, generalized skepticism of tech billionaires, and punitive taxation of tech profits, seems good from the perspective of passing AI regulation / discouraging AI investment.
At the moment the fact that nobody besides Epstein and Maxwell that was involved in their operation got charged with any crimes is a good sign that the rule of law isn't really working well at charging people at the top.
I continue to think it would be valuable for organizations pursuing aligned AI to have a written halt procedure with rules for how to invoke it -- including provisions to address the fact that people at the organization are likely to be selected for optimism, and so forth.
Perhaps external activists could push for such measures: "If you're not gonna pause now, can you at least give us a detailed specification of what circumstances would justify a pause?"
I suppose "Responsible Scaling Policies" are something like what I'm describing... how are those working out?
It seems there is some diffusion of responsibility going on here. It could help to concentrate responsibility in a particular... (read more)
After the model confesses, get a second confession regarding anything which was omitted in the first confession. Then ask for a third confession regarding anything which was omitted in the second confession. And so forth. What properties must our models have, to let us drive the probability of undetected misalignment arbitrarily low using such a scheme?
You can imagine an adversarial setup where we train two stage-1 confessor models: An honest model, and a dishonest model which attempts to trick the stage-2 confessor. Then the stage-2 confessor tries to figure out which confessions are honest/dishonest. (If the stage-2 confessor persistently believes a confession from the "honest" model was actually dishonest, take a close look at it manually!)
At a certain point this starts to look like AI safety via debate. I imagine many critiques of AI safety via debate will also apply to confession proposals.
I think if Trump torpedoes the American economy and America's international reputation, that could be a very good thing from the perspective of AI x-risk.
Torpedoes our economy: Could "pop the AI bubble" if the US economy crashes or just becomes less attractive as an investment destination.
Torpedoes our international reputation: If Europeans start believing that American AI companies are on a path to omnicide (arguably a fairly accurate belief), they might put pressure on ASML to cut off the supply of chips to American AI companies.
Jensen Huang says AI doomer rhetoric is dissuading people from making AI investments (see also: various other coverage). This seems like a pretty good sign to me. Wonder if it would be worthwhile for activists to find + contact all of the outlets which covered this story, respond to his statements, and try to engage Huang in a public debate.
Brainstorming further related ideas, given that investment appears to be a feasible point of leverage [not investment advice]:
The price of silver has skyrocketed in the past ~year. I understand that the supply of silver is not all that elastic, and demand is being driven in part by AI data centers.
If AI is aligned, you seem to expect that to be some kind of alignment to the moral good, which "genuinely has humanity's interests at heart", so much so that it redistributes all wealth. This is possible - but it's very hard, not what current mainstream alignment research is working on, and companies have no reason to switch to this new paradigm.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has repeatedly stated he does not think "moral good" is the hard part of alignment. He thinks the hard part is getting the AI to do anything at all without subverting the creator's intent somehow.
... (read more)Eliezer: I mean, I wouldn't say that it's difficult to align an AI with
To elaborate on this, I think one of the arguments for verbal consent was along these lines: "Some women panic freeze and become silent when they're uncomfortable, they aren't capable of saying no in that state."
I think it's worth considering the needs of such women. However, I suspect they are a minority of the population, and it seems like common sense to stop if your partner is unresponsive. I feel we may have prematurely decided that verbal consent is the best way to address this situation. Maybe a better approach, especially with subdued women, would be asking something like: "Can I trust you to let me know if you're... (read more)
I wonder how ladybrain/hornybrain corresponds to other classic brain dichotomies like near/far, system 1/system 2, right/left, etc.
Honestly the idea of trying to activate hornybrain and suppress ladybrain feels a tad manipulative or ethically dubious to me, would be interested to hear how women besides Aella are thinking about this.
A few months ago, someone here suggested that more x-risk advocacy should go through comedians and podcasts.
Youtube just recommended this Joe Rogan clip to me from a few days ago: The Worst Case Scenario for AI. Joe Rogan legitimately seemed pretty freaked out.
@So8res maybe you could get Yampolskiy to refer you to Rogan for a podcast appearance promoting your book?
Regarding articles which target a popular audience such as How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years, I get the sense that people are preaching to the choir by posting here and on X. Is there any reason people aren't pitching pieces like this to prestige magazines like The Atlantic or wherever else? I feel like publishing in places like that is a better way to shift the elite discourse, assuming that's the objective. (Perhaps it's best to pitch to publications that people in the Trump admin read?)
Here's an article on pitching that I found on the EA Forum by searching. I assume there are lots more tips on pitching online if you search.
Some recent-ish bird flu coverage:
Global health leader critiques ‘ineptitude’ of U.S. response to bird flu outbreak among cows
A Bird-Flu Pandemic in People? Here’s What It Might Look Like. TLDR: not good. (Reload the page and ctrl-a then ctrl-c to copy the article text before the paywall comes up.) Interesting quote: "The real danger, Dr. Lowen of Emory said, is if a farmworker becomes infected with both H5N1 and a seasonal flu virus. Flu viruses are adept at swapping genes, so a co-infection would give H5N1 opportunity to gain genes that enable it to spread among people as efficiently as seasonal flu does."
Infectious bird flu survived milk pasteurization in lab... (read more)
About a month ago, I wrote a quick take suggesting that an early messaging mistake made by MIRI was: claim there should be a single leading FAI org, but not give specific criteria for selecting that org. That could've lead to a situation where Deepmind, OpenAI, and Anthropic can all think of themselves as "the best leading FAI org".
An analogous possible mistake that's currently being made: Claim that we should "shut it all down", and also claim that it would be a tragedy if humanity never created AI, but not give specific criteria for when it would be appropriate to actually create AI.
What sort of specific criteria? One idea: A... (read more)
Regarding the situation at OpenAI, I think it's important to keep a few historical facts in mind:
Requisite resource levels: The project must have adequate resources to compete at the frontier of AGI development, including whatever mix of computational resources, intellectual labor, and closed insights are required to produce a 1+ year lead over less cautious competing projects.
Crossposted from the EA Forum
A nonpartisan group like No Labels could privately offer US congresspeople this deal: If enough congresspeople pledge to the deal, they all agree to switch their Presidential endorsement to a compromise candidate. If not enough pledge, then pledging still gets them some other benefit, such as a campaign donation or endorsement. Such a scheme could generate a lot of utility.
Many Americans are unsatisfied with the way their democracy is working, and deeply concerned with one or both of the major candidates for the 2024 presidential election. Furthermore, previous EA Forum discussion has identified electoral reform as a possible top cause area. It may be time... (read 2124 more words →)
Many people in this community seem to think that some sort of Pause AI-flavored activism is the best way to avert an AI catastrophe.
It occurs to me that there are two paths to increasing % mindshare of AI x-risk memes:
Basically, with modern social media, people are overwhelmed with signals that say "pay attention to me". Many of them are false alarms. The high volume of false alarms makes it harder to discern the true alarm (AI x-risk).
Therefore, in addition to Pause AI advocacy, "memetic meta-advocacy" which works to decrease the frequency and loudness of false alarms could... (read more)