This question is more about personal decision-making rather than for example deciding to work on AI safety for altruistic reasons. If I were thinking about this from a purely selfish perspective, it seems pretty likely that if I expect transformative AI to arrive in 20 years, I should live my...
From the comment thread:
I'm not a fan of *generic* regulation-boosting. Like, if I just had a megaphone to shout to the world, "More regulation of AI!" I would not use it. I want to do more targeted advocacy of regulation that I think is more likely to be good and less likely to result in regulatory-capture
What are specific regulations / existing proposals that you think are likely to be good? When people are protesting to pause AI, what do you want them to be speaking into a megaphone (if you think those kinds of protests could be helpful at all right now)?
This is so much fun! I wish I could download them!
I thought I didn’t get angry much in response to people making specific claims. I did some introspection about times in the recent past when I got angry, defensive, or withdrew from a conversation in response to claims that the other person made.
After some introspection, I think these are the mechanisms that made me feel that way:
Advice of this specific form has been has been helpful for me in the past. Sometimes I don't notice immediately when the actions I'm taking are not ones I would endorse after a bit of thinking (particularly when they're fun and good for me in the short-term but bad for others or for me longer-term). This is also why having rules to follow for myself is helpful (eg: never lying or breaking promises)
women more often these days choose not to make this easy, ramping up the fear and cost of rejection by choosing to deliberately inflict social or emotional costs as part of the rejection
I'm curious about how common this is, and what sort of social or emotional costs are being referred to.
Sure feels like it would be a tiny minority of women doing it but maybe I'm underestimating how often men experience something like this.
My goals for money, social status, and even how much I care about my family don't seem all that stable and have changed a bunch over time. They seem to be arising from some deeper combination of desires to be accepted, to have security, to feel good about myself, to avoid effortful work etc. interacting with my environment. Yet I wouldn't think of myself as primarily pursuing those deeper desires, and during various periods would have self-modified if given the option to more aggressively pursue the goals that I (the "I" that was steering things) thought I cared about (like doing really well at a specific skill, which turned out to be a fleeting goal with time).
Current AI safety university groups are overall a good idea and helpful, in expectation, for reducing AI existential risk
Things will basically be fine regarding job loss and unemployment due to AI in the next several years and those worries are overstated
Topics I would be excited to have a dialogue about [will add to this list as I think of more]:
I attended an AI pause protest recently and thought I’d write up what my experience was like for people considering going to future ones.
I hadn’t been to a protest ever before and didn’t know what to expect. I will probably attend more in the future.
Some things that happened:
Paul Graham's essay on What You Can't Say is very practical. The tests/exercises he recommends for learning true, controversial things were useful to me.
Even if trying the following tests yields statements that aren't immediately useful, I think the act of noticing where you disagree with someone or something more powerful is good practice. I think similar mental muscles get used when noticing when you disagree or are confused about a commonly-held assumption in a research field or when noticing important ideas that others are neglecting.
The different exercises he suggests (copied or paraphrased according to how I internalised them):
The conformist test: asking yourself the classic "Do I have any opinions that I would... (read more)
One way people can help is by stating their beliefs on AI and the confidence in those beliefs to their friends, family members, and acquaintances who they talk to.
Currently, a bunch of people are coming across things in the news talking about humanity going extinct if AI progress continues as it has and no more alignment research happens. I would expect many of them to not think seriously about it because it's really hard to shake out of the "business as usual" frame. Most of your friends and family members probably know you're a reasonable, thoughtful person and it seems helpful to make people feel comfortable engaging with the arguments in a... (read more)
From Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 (written in 1999):
On Politics and Society
... (read 399 more words →)People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers. Automated personalities are superior to humans in some ways, such as having very reliable memories and, if desired, predictable (and programmable) personalities. They are not yet regarded as equal to humans in the subtlety of their personalities, although there is disagreement on this point.
An undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence. There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. Computer intelligence is thoroughly interwoven
GPT-4 generated TL;DR (mostly endorsed but eh):
It's interesting that I feel attuned to social status in EA/EA-adjacent settings. I have been in settings before where people had more status according to the standards of the general public (eg: having political power, being extremely wealthy) and status didn't feel like a salient thing to me in those contexts. My initial guess for what makes EA settings different is that I don't feel particularly threatened by people's perception of my political power or wealth being damaged but in EA settings it feels like being perceived as highly intelligent is more important and I do feel more anxious about people not thinking I'm smart. I also have status-anxiety in situations with... (read more)
For sanity reasons, I tried writing down my thoughts quickly about AI alignment and where they actually come from. I know a bunch about various parts of various alignment agendas from reading posts and attending talks and I sometimes can hold my own in conversations about them. However, a lot of my actual thoughts about how I expect things to turn out are super fuzzy, sound dumb, and are very much based on deferring to people and being very confused.
Why is AI existential risk a big deal
Big models seem competent at various things. I currently predict that in 2023, I will see more impressive advances in AI than in 2022. I am... (read 960 more words →)
The Art of Gathering book is useful for folks who organise events. The suggestions line up with my experiences of the best gatherings (workshops, retreats, hangouts, etc.) I have attended. You can get most of the value from reading a summary. Here's mine:
Due to lurking online in the rationalist community as a teenager, I had so much anxiety about intelligence that affected my life. In particular, it made me avoid testing my fit for different things because I thought I wasn't smart and didn't want to confirm it to myself. And it made me more anxious about giving up on things that were a bad fit because I thought not being good at a thing was evidence of my not being smart enough. Things I would tell teenage me if I could go back in time:
This question is more about personal decision-making rather than for example deciding to work on AI safety for altruistic reasons. If I were thinking about this from a purely selfish perspective, it seems pretty likely that if I expect transformative AI to arrive in 20 years, I should live my life a bit differently than people who don't expect to get TAI in their lifetimes.
I'm curious about if your own beliefs on AI timelines have affected anything that you do in your personal life - perhaps decisions related to saving money, personal relationships, health etc.
Cullen O'Keefe also no longer at OpenAI (as of last month)