x

LESSWRONG

LW

Raymond Douglas — LessWrong

Raymond Douglas

Top postsTop post

Raymond Douglas

Message

I'm a researcher at ACS working on understanding agency and optimisation, especially in the context of how ais work and how society is going to work once the ais are everywhere.

3438

Ω

107

27

85

5y

Raymond Douglas

I'm a researcher at ACS working on understanding agency and optimisation, especially in the context of how ais work and how society is going to work once the ais are everywhere.

Top postsTop post

Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development

Full version on arXiv | X Executive summary AI risk scenarios usually portray a relatively sudden loss of human control to AIs, outmaneuvering individual humans and human institutions, due to a sudden increase in AI capabilities, or a coordinated betrayal. However, we argue that even an incremental increase in AI capabilities, without any coordinated power-seeking, poses a substantial risk of eventual human disempowerment. This loss of human influence will be centrally driven by having more competitive machine alternatives to humans in almost all societal functions, such as economic labor, decision making, artistic creation, and even companionship. A gradual loss of control of our own civilization might sound implausible. Hasn't technological disruption usually improved aggregate human welfare? We argue that the alignment of societal systems with human interests has been stable only because of the necessity of human participation for thriving economies, states, and cultures. Once this human participation gets displaced by more competitive machine alternatives, our institutions' incentives for growth will be untethered from a need to ensure human flourishing. Decision-makers at all levels will soon face pressures to reduce human involvement across labor markets, governance structures, cultural production, and even social interactions. Those who resist these pressures will eventually be displaced by those who do not. Still, wouldn't humans notice what's happening and coordinate to stop it? Not necessarily. What makes this transition particularly hard to resist is that pressures on each societal system bleed into the others. For example, we might attempt to use state power and cultural attitudes to preserve human economic power. However, the economic incentives for companies to replace humans with AI will also push them to influence states and culture to support this change, using their growing economic power to shape both policy and public opinion, which will in t

210Jan 30, 2025

The Artificial Self

The Machines Lack Honour

Persona Parasitology

A brief(ish) introduction to LM psychology

Why LM Psychology? One of the great ironies of modern language models is that we create them, we know exactly what computations constitute them, and yet we do not really understand them. More precisely, we do not understand them on a level of abstraction that lets us reliably predict how...

ACS Infra: free access to large base models for LLM psychology research

by Martin Vaněk, Jan_Kulveit, Ondřej Havlíček, Ivar Frisch, Veronika_H, vgel, Raymond Douglas, Charlie Amis, and Faw Ali

TL;DR: We're opening a platform serving large open base models to researchers and tinkerers working on LLM psychology and adjacent areas. It's free and comes with logprobs, activation harvesting and steering, a browser workbench, and a loom. Read here what research we’d like to see and apply for access at...

ASI and Liberty: Can we do better than a benevolent god?

Zvi recently coined a nice distinction between AGI-pilled and ASI-pilled: as more people are reckoning with the speed of progress, some are beginning to come around to the fact that AI could be superhuman at a huge range of tasks in a way that radically reshapes society, but not that...

Pacing the Frontier: A Framework & Research Agenda

by CharlesD, technicalities, Raymond Douglas, and Nowe Moore

Below is the executive summary from our new paper at pacing.tech. The full paper is available on the site and as a PDF. The full author list is Raymond Douglas, Charles Dillon, Nikola Moore, Gavin Leech, Shahar Avin, Mathias Kirk Bonde, Rohit Krishnan, Noah Perez, Nathan Young, Cormac Slade Byrd,...

Epistemics and Coordination: It’s complicated!

Money is pouring in, people are looking for new areas to fund, and the invisible hand is starting to grab a bit at AI for epistemics and coordination (AIFEC hereafter). It also got invoked in AI2040 as a potential part of the winning strategy. My feelings here are mixed —...

Structural Proxies

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what work would help with actually winning and getting to good worlds. In the spirit of that I decided to venture outside my normal wheelhouse and spend some time reflecting on what technical research could make me more confident about powerful AIs being...

The Machines Lack Honour

The battle lines of the AI morality debate are being laid down. On one side you have the ChatGPT dogma: AI as mere tools with no real preferences or even beliefs. On the other you have the twitter AI whisperers: AIs as complex beings with rich personalities and desires which...

Load More (7/44)