The impression I get is that lots of people are like “yeah, I’d like to see more work on this & this could be very important” but there aren’t that many people who want to work on this & have ideas.
Is there evidence that funding isn’t available for this work? My loose impression is that mainstream funders would be interested in this. I suppose it’s an area where it’s especially hard to evaluate the promisingness of a proposal, though.
Reasons people might not be interested in doing this work:
— Tractability
— Poor feedback loops
— Not many others in the community to get feedback from
— Has to deal with thorny and hard-to-concretize theoretical questions
Reasons people might want to work on this:
— Importance and neglectedness
— Seems plausible that one could become one of the most knowledgeable EAs on this topic in not much time
— Interdisciplinary; might involve interacting a lot with the non-EA world, academia, etc
— Intellectually stimulating
The impression I get is that lots of people are like “yeah, I’d like to see more work on this & this could be very important” but there aren’t that many people who want to work on this & have ideas.
Is there evidence that funding isn’t available for this work? My loose impression is that mainstream funders would be interested in this. I suppose it’s an area where it’s especially hard to evaluate the promisingness of a proposal, though.
Reasons people might not be interested in doing this work: — Tractability — Poor feedback loops — Not many others in the community to get feedback from — Has to deal with thorny and hard-to-concretize theoretical questions
Reasons people might want to work on this: — Importance and neglectedness — Seems plausible that one could become one of the most knowledgeable EAs on this topic in not much time — Interdisciplinary; might involve interacting a lot with the non-EA world, academia, etc — Intellectually stimulating
See also: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-long-artificial-sentience/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103