oh hey i ran that rationality meetup on radical empathy and AI welfare. i think it went pretty well and it was directly prompted by AI welfare debate week happening on the forums, so thanks for organizing!
i can talk a little more about the takeaways from that meetup specifically, which had around a half dozen attendees:
it was really interesting to try to model how to even plausibly give moral weight to entities that were so bizarrely different from biotic life forms (e.g. can be shut down and rebooted/reverted, can change their own reward functions, can spin up a million copies of itself.) we kept running into assumptions around ideas like consciousness and pain that just sort of fell apart upon any sort of examination
i tried to construct a scenario/case study with an ai entity that was possibly developing sentience, and the response from basically everyone was “wow these behaviours are sus and we have to shoot the mainframe with a gun immediately”. this was kind of genuinely illuminating to me about the difficulties of trying to grant ~rights/freedoms to something more powerful than yourself and discussing the specifics of the case study turned the sense of danger from something abstract to something that felt real. we tried to come up with some possible ways for an AI entity to signal ~deservingness of moral weight without signalling dangerous capabilities and kind of came up blank, but this might say more about the collective intelligence of the meetup attendees than it does anything else haha.
like, i don’t think these are amazing take-aways, in that higher quality versions of these conclusions have surely been written up in the forums long before debate week. but i think it’s helpful to get them in the water a bit more, and i came out of it with a greater appreciation for the complexity of this question (and also like, more deeply grokking the difficulties of alignment research and just how different ai entities can be from humans).
out of curiousity, do you remember how you came across the meetup posting?
Thanks for fleshing that out jenn! (and for running the meeting). I’ll feed this back to my team. I found the meetup either via a google search for “AI Welfare Debate Week” or a backlink checker.
This is the backlink checker. It’s pretty helpful for seeing whether your posts (or in my case, events) have been mentioned anywhere outside of the Forum.
oh hey i ran that rationality meetup on radical empathy and AI welfare. i think it went pretty well and it was directly prompted by AI welfare debate week happening on the forums, so thanks for organizing!
i can talk a little more about the takeaways from that meetup specifically, which had around a half dozen attendees:
it was really interesting to try to model how to even plausibly give moral weight to entities that were so bizarrely different from biotic life forms (e.g. can be shut down and rebooted/reverted, can change their own reward functions, can spin up a million copies of itself.) we kept running into assumptions around ideas like consciousness and pain that just sort of fell apart upon any sort of examination
i tried to construct a scenario/case study with an ai entity that was possibly developing sentience, and the response from basically everyone was “wow these behaviours are sus and we have to shoot the mainframe with a gun immediately”. this was kind of genuinely illuminating to me about the difficulties of trying to grant ~rights/freedoms to something more powerful than yourself and discussing the specifics of the case study turned the sense of danger from something abstract to something that felt real. we tried to come up with some possible ways for an AI entity to signal ~deservingness of moral weight without signalling dangerous capabilities and kind of came up blank, but this might say more about the collective intelligence of the meetup attendees than it does anything else haha.
like, i don’t think these are amazing take-aways, in that higher quality versions of these conclusions have surely been written up in the forums long before debate week. but i think it’s helpful to get them in the water a bit more, and i came out of it with a greater appreciation for the complexity of this question (and also like, more deeply grokking the difficulties of alignment research and just how different ai entities can be from humans).
out of curiousity, do you remember how you came across the meetup posting?
Thanks for fleshing that out jenn! (and for running the meeting). I’ll feed this back to my team.
I found the meetup either via a google search for “AI Welfare Debate Week” or a backlink checker.
This is the backlink checker. It’s pretty helpful for seeing whether your posts (or in my case, events) have been mentioned anywhere outside of the Forum.