The section on DeepMind explains how capabilities & alignment came to be intertwined. Since GDM was also probably the organization with the strongest prestige dynamics & status hierarchies adversarial to safety, I'll add a couple of subjective anecdotes on what it was like from the inside to hold the view that DeepMind's core AGI roadmap was both (a) plausible on short timelines and (b) dangerous, such that alignment should be taken seriously.
I worked in the comms and policy org starting in 2018. All external comms were ... (read more)
one conceptual contribution I'd put forward for consideration is whether this question may more about emotions or social equilibria than about reaching a reasoned intellectual consensus. it's worth considering how a relatively proximate/homogenous group of people tends to change its beliefs. for better or worse, everything from viscerally compelling demonstrations of safety problems to social pressure to coercion or top-down influence to the transition from intellectual to grou... (read more)
surprisingly powerful demonstration soon could change things too, 1% seems low. look at how quickly views can change about things like it's just the flu, current wave of updating from gpt3 (among certain communities), etc
Thank you for posting this!
The section on DeepMind explains how capabilities & alignment came to be intertwined. Since GDM was also probably the organization with the strongest prestige dynamics & status hierarchies adversarial to safety, I'll add a couple of subjective anecdotes on what it was like from the inside to hold the view that DeepMind's core AGI roadmap was both (a) plausible on short timelines and (b) dangerous, such that alignment should be taken seriously.
I worked in the comms and policy org starting in 2018. All external comms were ... (read more)