“It’s not clear that advanced artificial intelligence is going to arrive any time within the next several decades”—On the other hand, it’s seems, at least to me, most likely that it will. Even if several more breakthroughs would be required to reach general intelligence, those may still come relatively fast as deep learning has now finally become useful enough in a wide enough array of applications that there is far more money and talent in the field than there ever was before by orders of magnitude. Now this by itself wouldn’t necessarily guarantee fast advancement in a field, but AI research is still the kind of area where a single individual can push the research forward significantly just by themselves. And governments are beginning to realise the strategic importance of AI, so even more resources are flooding the field.
“One of the top AI safety organizations, MIRI, has now gone private so now we can’t even inspect whether they are doing useful work.”—this is not an unreasonable choice and we have their past record to go on. Nonetheless, there are more open options if this is important to you.
“Productive AI safety research work is inaccessible to over 99.9% of the population, making this advice almost useless to nearly everyone reading the article.”—Not necessarily. Even if becoming good enough to be a researcher is very hard, it probably isn’t nearly as hard to become good enough at a particular area to help mentor other people.
“It’s not clear that advanced artificial intelligence is going to arrive any time within the next several decades”—On the other hand, it’s seems, at least to me, most likely that it will. Even if several more breakthroughs would be required to reach general intelligence, those may still come relatively fast as deep learning has now finally become useful enough in a wide enough array of applications that there is far more money and talent in the field than there ever was before by orders of magnitude. Now this by itself wouldn’t necessarily guarantee fast advancement in a field, but AI research is still the kind of area where a single individual can push the research forward significantly just by themselves. And governments are beginning to realise the strategic importance of AI, so even more resources are flooding the field.
“One of the top AI safety organizations, MIRI, has now gone private so now we can’t even inspect whether they are doing useful work.”—this is not an unreasonable choice and we have their past record to go on. Nonetheless, there are more open options if this is important to you.
“Productive AI safety research work is inaccessible to over 99.9% of the population, making this advice almost useless to nearly everyone reading the article.”—Not necessarily. Even if becoming good enough to be a researcher is very hard, it probably isn’t nearly as hard to become good enough at a particular area to help mentor other people.