It occurs to me that another reason for the lack of engagement by people with philosophy backgrounds may be that philosophers aren’t aware of the many philosophical problems in AI alignment that they could potentially contribute to. So here’s a list of philosophical problems that have come up just in my own thinking about AI alignment.
EDIT: Since the actual list is perhaps only of tangential interest here (and is taking up a lot of screen space that people have to scroll through), I’ve moved it to the AI Alignment Forum.
Wei’s list focused on ethics and decision theory, but I think that it would be most valuable to have more good conceptual analysis of the arguments for why AI safety matters, and particularly the role of concepts like “agency”, “intelligence”, and “goal-directed behaviour”. While it’d be easier to tackle these given some knowledge of machine learning, I don’t think that background is necessary—clarity of thought is probably the most important thing.
It occurs to me that another reason for the lack of engagement by people with philosophy backgrounds may be that philosophers aren’t aware of the many philosophical problems in AI alignment that they could potentially contribute to. So here’s a list of philosophical problems that have come up just in my own thinking about AI alignment.
EDIT: Since the actual list is perhaps only of tangential interest here (and is taking up a lot of screen space that people have to scroll through), I’ve moved it to the AI Alignment Forum.
Wei’s list focused on ethics and decision theory, but I think that it would be most valuable to have more good conceptual analysis of the arguments for why AI safety matters, and particularly the role of concepts like “agency”, “intelligence”, and “goal-directed behaviour”. While it’d be easier to tackle these given some knowledge of machine learning, I don’t think that background is necessary—clarity of thought is probably the most important thing.