Asking on behalf of Daniel Satanove, former intern at MIRI (summer 2014):
What do other people who are concerned with AI safety (e.g., Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stuart Russell, etc.) think the path to friendly AI is? Are there other people who are working directly on Friendly AI research other than MIRI?
(1) I don’t want to put words in their mouths. I’m guessing that most of us have fairly broad priors over what may happen, though. The future’s hard to predict.
(2) Depends what you mean by “Friendly AI research.” Does AI boxing count? Does improving the transparency of ML algorithms count? Once the FLI grants start going through, there will be lots of people doing long-term AI safety research that may well be useful, so if you count that as FAI research, then the answer is “there will be soon.” But if by “FAI research” you mean “working towards a theoretical understanding of highly reliable advanced agents,” then the answer is “not to my knowledge, no.”
Asking on behalf of Daniel Satanove, former intern at MIRI (summer 2014):
What do other people who are concerned with AI safety (e.g., Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stuart Russell, etc.) think the path to friendly AI is? Are there other people who are working directly on Friendly AI research other than MIRI?
(1) I don’t want to put words in their mouths. I’m guessing that most of us have fairly broad priors over what may happen, though. The future’s hard to predict.
(2) Depends what you mean by “Friendly AI research.” Does AI boxing count? Does improving the transparency of ML algorithms count? Once the FLI grants start going through, there will be lots of people doing long-term AI safety research that may well be useful, so if you count that as FAI research, then the answer is “there will be soon.” But if by “FAI research” you mean “working towards a theoretical understanding of highly reliable advanced agents,” then the answer is “not to my knowledge, no.”