Apparently doominess works for my brain, cause Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities convinced me to look in to AI safety. Either I’d find out he’s wrong, and there is no problem. Or he’s right, and I need to reevaluate my life priorities.

After a month of sporadic reading, I've learned the field is considered to be in a state of preparadigmicity. In other words, we don’t know *how* to think about the problem yet, and thus novelty comes at a premium. The best way to generate novel ideas is to pull in people from other disciplines. In my case that's computational psychology: modeling people like agents. And I've mostly applied this to video games. My Pareto frontier is "modeling people like agents based on their behavior logs in constructed games created to trigger reward signals + ITT'ing the hell out of all the new people I love to constantly meet". I have no idea if this background makes me more or less likely to generate a new idea that's useful to solving AI alignment, but the way I understand the problem now: everyone should at least try.

So I started studying AI alignment, but quickly realized there is a trade-off: The more I learn, the harder it is to think of anything new. At first I had a lot of naive ideas on how to solve the alignment problem. As I learned more about the field, my ideas all crumbled. At the same time, I can't really assess yet if there is a useful level of novelty in my naive hypotheses. I'm still currently generating ideas low on "contamination" by existing thought (cause I'm new), but also low on quality (cause I'm new). As I learn more, I'll start generating higher quality hypotheses, but these are likely to become increasingly constrained to the existing schools of thought, because of cognitive contamination from everyone reading the same material and thinking in similar ways. Which is exactly the thing we want to avoid at this stage.

Therefore, to get the best of both worlds, I figured I'd write down my naive hypotheses as I have them, and keep studying at the same time. Maybe an ostensibly "stupid" idea on my end, inspires someone with more experience to a workable idea on their end. Even if the probability of that is <0.1%, it's still worth it. Cause, you know, .... I prefer we don't all die.

So here goes:

H1 - Emotional Empathy

If you give a human absolute power, there is a small subset of human...

kimsolez

kimsolez