My plan for a “Most Important Century” reading group

Since I’m new to EA community building, I wanted to post my ideas here as a resource for other EA groups and to open them up to critique. Several ideas in this post were inspired by Tessa’s “How to run a high-energy reading group”.

For reference, “Most Important Century” is a blog series by Holden Karnofsky which outlines the potential for AI to automate scientific advancement within this century, thereby shaping the future direction of a possibly galaxy-spanning civilization.

Target audience

3-6 highly engaged members of EA University of Queensland.

Several people I know have expressed interest in reading this blog series, so a reading group should ensure we actually read it. The main purpose of the reading group is to keep us engaged with recent ideas in the EA community, not to introduce new people to EA ideas (we will be running an intro fellowship for that purpose).

Weekly schedule

Each meeting will be an hour long, with the option to stay around after and continue chatting.

Before each meeting, I will remind each member to think of 1-2 questions to bring to the meeting.

In the first 10 minutes of each meeting, we will write our questions in a shared Google doc, which can later serve as our notes on the discussion (if needed). I initially wanted to give each reading group member a role, as mentioned in Tessa’s post. I decided against this as people are likely to miss a few weeks unexpectedly, and I wanted more flexibility in my structure.

The questions will help keep the conversation focused and ensure that all group members are getting their questions answered. This should make group members feel that they are getting personal value from the discussion.

Note that there could be more than 10 questions, which is too many for a manageable discussion – however, it’s likely that people’s questions will substantially overlap. There should be around 5 unique questions to cover.

For the rest of the call, we will discuss the questions, keeping in mind the 10 facilitation tips and tricks listed here to try and keep the discussion as high-quality as possible.

Syllabus

I’m aiming to have 20-40min of reading each week. This equates to about 2 blog posts a week to read through. In this section, I discuss the posts I have chosen for each week, and my reasoning.

WK1: “All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild” and “The Duplicator”
I’m not a fan of having an introductory week where we just read a quick summary of the series, because I find there is not much productive discussion to be had. This week, we read the first two blog posts.

WK2: “Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal”
This post seems interesting enough that it should be enough for one week’s discussion alone.

WK3: “This Can’t Go On” and “Forecasting Transformative AI, Part 1: What Kind of AI?”.
Optional further reading: “Why AI Alignment Could Be Hard With Modern Deep Learning (guest post)”
I chose to make this 3^rd post an optional reading because it doesn’t appear to be central to the blog series. This reading group is not intended to be focused on AI alignment, and I would encourage members to seek other material if they want to go more in-depth on AI safety.

WK4: “Forecasting Transformative AI: What’s The Burden Of Proof?” and “Forecasting Transformative AI: Are We ‘Trending Toward’ Transformative AI?”

WK5: “Forecasting Transformative AI: The ‘Biological Anchors’ Method In A Nutshell” and “AI Timelines: Where The Arguments, And The ‘Experts,’ Stand”

WK6: “How To Make The Best Of The Most Important Century?” and “Call To Vigilance”

WK7: Weak Points in “Most Important Century”: full automation and lock-in
These EA Forum posts are not written by Karnofsky, but he acknowledges them as valuable supplementary resources. It is important to critique new ideas, so I thought these posts should be included in the syllabus