The geometric intuition underlying this post already proves useful for me!
Yesterday, while discussing with a friend why I want to change my research topic to AI Safety instead of what I currently do (distributed computing), my first intuition was that AI safety aims at shaping the future, while distributed computing is relatively agnostic about it. But a far better intuition comes when considering the vector along the current trajectory in state space, starting at the current position of the world, and whose direction and length capture the trajectory and the speed at which we follow it.
From this perspective, the difference between distributed computing/hardware/cloud computing research and AI safety research is obvious in terms of vector operations:
The former amounts to positive scaling of the vector, and thus makes us go along our current trajectory faster.
While the latter amounts to rotations (and maybe scaling, but it is a bit less relevant), which allows us to change our trajectory.
And since I am not sure we are heading in the right direction, I prefer to be able to change the trajectory (at least potentially).
Happy to see you found it useful, Adam! Yes, general technological development corresponding to scaling of the vector is exactly the kind of intuition it’s meant to carry.
The geometric intuition underlying this post already proves useful for me!
Yesterday, while discussing with a friend why I want to change my research topic to AI Safety instead of what I currently do (distributed computing), my first intuition was that AI safety aims at shaping the future, while distributed computing is relatively agnostic about it. But a far better intuition comes when considering the vector along the current trajectory in state space, starting at the current position of the world, and whose direction and length capture the trajectory and the speed at which we follow it.
From this perspective, the difference between distributed computing/hardware/cloud computing research and AI safety research is obvious in terms of vector operations:
The former amounts to positive scaling of the vector, and thus makes us go along our current trajectory faster.
While the latter amounts to rotations (and maybe scaling, but it is a bit less relevant), which allows us to change our trajectory.
And since I am not sure we are heading in the right direction, I prefer to be able to change the trajectory (at least potentially).
Happy to see you found it useful, Adam! Yes, general technological development corresponding to scaling of the vector is exactly the kind of intuition it’s meant to carry.