Jim Buhler

Written in June 2023. I’ve only made some light style edits before posting here. Hence, this piece does not necessarily reflect my current views. I originally did not want to post it because I disagreed with some of the stuff I wrote (or at least thought it needed more justification)....

Written in June 2023. I’ve only made some light style edits before posting here. Hence, this piece does not necessarily reflect my current views and ignores everything that happened with AI since June 2023. Still, I think some might find this relevant. Note that every time I write “alignment” or...

> You are one of the best long-range snipers in the World. You often have to eliminate targets standing one or two miles away and rarely miss. Crucially, this is not because you are better than others at aligning the scope of your rifle with the target’s head before taking...

I was listening to Anders Sandberg talk about "humble futures" (i.e., futures that may be considered good in a sober non-"let's tile the universe with X" way), and started wondering whether training (not yet proven safe) AIs to have such "humble" scope-insensitive-ish goals -- which seems more tractable than (complete)...

It is widely believed in the EA community that AI progress is acutely harmful by substantially increasing X-risks. This has led to a growing priority on pushing against work advancing AI capabilities.[1] On the other hand, economic growth, scientific advancements, and (non-AI) technological progress are generally viewed as highly beneficial,...

The case Most of the future things we care about – i.e., (dis)value – come, in expectation, from futures where humanity develops artificial general intelligence (AGI) and colonizes many other stars (Bostrom 2003; MacAskill 2022; Althaus and Gloor 2016). Hanson (2021) and Cook (2022) estimate that we should expect to...

Assume we're in a simulation and know it. Should we be surprised by how flawless it seems? We (almost) never encounter situations where we feel like something's off (like "oh, what just happened is the kind of thing we should expect to happen in a simulation rather than in an...