Thanks for your back and forth. After finishing my Master‘s I had an offer for a PhD position in consciousness (& meditation) and decided against this because arguments close to yours, Daniel.
I agree that we probably shouldn’t aim at solving philosophy and feeding this to an AI, but I wonder if one could make a stronger case along something like: at some point advanced AI systems will come into contact with philosophical problems, and the better and the more of them we humans understand at the time the AI was designed, the better the chances of building aligned systems that can take over responsibility responsibly. Maybe one could think about (fictional?) cultures that have for some reason never explored Utilitarianism much but still are technologically highly developed. I suppose I’d think they’d have somewhat worse chances of building aligned systems, though I don’t trust my intuitions much here.
Well said. I agree that that is a path to impact for the sort of work QRI is doing, it just seems lower-priority to me than other things like working on AI alignment or AI governance. Not to mention the tractability / neglectedness concerns (philosophy is famously intractable, and there’s an entire academic discipline for it already)
Thanks for your back and forth. After finishing my Master‘s I had an offer for a PhD position in consciousness (& meditation) and decided against this because arguments close to yours, Daniel.
I agree that we probably shouldn’t aim at solving philosophy and feeding this to an AI, but I wonder if one could make a stronger case along something like: at some point advanced AI systems will come into contact with philosophical problems, and the better and the more of them we humans understand at the time the AI was designed, the better the chances of building aligned systems that can take over responsibility responsibly. Maybe one could think about (fictional?) cultures that have for some reason never explored Utilitarianism much but still are technologically highly developed. I suppose I’d think they’d have somewhat worse chances of building aligned systems, though I don’t trust my intuitions much here.
Well said. I agree that that is a path to impact for the sort of work QRI is doing, it just seems lower-priority to me than other things like working on AI alignment or AI governance. Not to mention the tractability / neglectedness concerns (philosophy is famously intractable, and there’s an entire academic discipline for it already)