Anecdotally, the EA forum skews [...] more Bay Area.
For what it’s worth, this is not my impression at all. Bay Area EAs (e.g. me) mostly consider the EA Forum to be very unrepresentative of their perspective, to the extent that it’s very rarely worthwhile to post here (which is why they often post on LessWrong instead).
This is not an obscure topic. It’s been written about endlessly! I do not want to encourage people to make top-level posts asking questions before Googling or talking to AIs, especially on this topic.
I like Claude’s response a lot more than you do. I’m not sure why. I agree that it’s a lot less informative than your response.
(The post including “This demographic has historically been disconnected from social impact” made me much less inclined to want this person to stick around.)
I feel like Claude’s answer is totally fine. The original question seemed to me consistent with the asker having read literally nothing on this topic before asking; I think that the content Claude said adds value given that.
I’m glad to hear you are inspired by EA’s utilitarian approach to maximizing social impact; I too am inspired by it and I have very much appreciated being involved with EA for the last decade.
I think you should probably ask questions as basic as this to AIs before asking people to talk to you about them. Here’s what Claude responded with.
The observation about EA’s demographic skew is accurate and widely acknowledged within the community. A few points worth making:
On the historical pattern: The claim that white, male, tech-focused demographics are “historically disconnected from social impact” isn’t quite right—these demographics have been heavily involved in philanthropy and social reform movements throughout history (from industrialist philanthropy to the civil rights movement’s diverse coalition). But the observation that EA specifically has a particular demographic concentration is valid.
Why this pattern exists: Several factors likely contribute:
EA grew out of academic philosophy and rationalist communities that had their own demographic patterns
The movement’s early focus areas (AI safety, global poverty, animal welfare) and analytical approach appealed to certain demographics more than others
Network effects and social clustering naturally amplified initial patterns
Geographic concentration in places like the Bay Area and Oxford
On diversity efforts: EA organizations have made various attempts to broaden participation, though with mixed results. There are efforts around:
Outreach to different universities and regions
Scholarships and programs aimed at underrepresented groups
Discussion of how framing and culture might inadvertently exclude some people
The harder question: There’s ongoing debate about whether demographic diversity is primarily valuable instrumentally (does it improve EA’s thinking and impact?) or intrinsically (is it important regardless of instrumental benefits?). Different people in EA would answer this differently, and it connects to deeper questions about EA’s core commitments and priorities.
Worth noting that some core EA principles (like cause impartiality and willingness to update beliefs based on evidence) might themselves be culturally specific in ways the movement doesn’t always recognize.
I think that this post summarizes Will’s position extremely inaccurately and unfairly.
An excerpt about the creation of PEPFAR, from “Days of Fire” by Peter Baker. I found this moving.
Another major initiative was shaping up around the same time. Since taking office, Bush had developed an interest in fighting AIDS in Africa. He had agreed to contribute to an international fund battling the disease and later started a program aimed at providing drugs to HIV-infected pregnant women to reduce the chances of transmitting the virus to their babies. But it had only whetted his appetite to do more. “When we did it, it revealed how unbelievably pathetic the U.S. effort was,” Michael Gerson said.
So Bush asked Bolten to come up with something more sweeping. Gerson was already thought of as “the custodian of compassionate conservatism within the White House,” as Bolten called him, and he took special interest in AIDS, which had killed his college roommate. Bolten assembled key White House policy aides Gary Edson, Jay Lefkowitz, and Kristen Silverberg in his office. In seeking something transformative, the only outsider they called in was Anthony Fauci, the renowned AIDS researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“What if money were no object?” Bolten asked. “What would you do?”
Bolten and the others expected him to talk about research for a vaccine because that was what he worked on.
“I’d love to have a few billion more dollars for vaccine research,” Fauci said, “but we’re putting a lot of money into it, and I could not give you any assurance that another single dollar spent on vaccine research is going to get us to a vaccine any faster than we are now.”
Instead, he added, “The thing you can do now is treatment.”
The development of low-cost drugs meant for the first time the world could get a grip on the disease and stop it from being a death sentence for millions of people. “They need the money now,” Fauci said. “They don’t need a vaccine ten years from now.”
The aides crafted a plan in secret, keeping it even from Colin Powell and Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services. They were ready for a final presentation to Bush on December 4. Just before heading into the meeting, Bush stopped by the Roosevelt Room to visit with Jewish leaders in town for the annual White House Hanukkah party later that day. The visitors were supportive of Bush’s confrontation with Iraq and showered him with praise. One of them, George Klein, founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition, recalled that his father had been among the Jewish leaders who tried to get Franklin Roosevelt to do more to stop the Holocaust. “I speak for everyone in this room when I say that if you had been president in the forties, there could have been millions of Jews saved,” the younger Klein said.
Bush choked up at the thought—“You could see his eyes well up,” Klein remembered—and went straight from that meeting to the AIDS meeting, the words ringing in his ears. Lefkowitz, who walked with the president from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, was convinced that sense of moral imperative emboldened Bush as he listened to the arguments about what had shaped up as a $15 billion, five-year program. Daniels and other budget-minded aides “were kind of gasping” about spending so much money, especially with all the costs of the struggle against terrorism and the looming invasion of Iraq. But Bush steered the conversation to aides he knew favored the program, and they argued forcefully for it.
“Gerson, what do you think?” Bush asked.
“If we can do this and we don’t, it will be a source of shame,” Gerson said.
Bush thought so too. So while he mostly wrestled with the coming war, he quietly set in motion one of the most expansive lifesaving programs ever attempted. Somewhere deep inside, the notion of helping the hopeless appealed to a former drinker’s sense of redemption, the belief that nobody was beyond saving.
“Look, this is one of those moments when we can actually change the lives of millions of people, a whole continent,” he told Lefkowitz after the meeting broke up. “How can we not take this step?”
I’m not saying we should treat criticisms very differently from non-criticism posts (except that criticisms are generally lower effort and lower value).
Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future
Seems false, probably people will just sort out some strategy for enforcing laws (e.g. having AI monitors travel with people and force them not to do stuff).
This was great, thanks for the link!
(For the record, I am sympathetic to both the preference utilitarian and hedonic utilitarian perspective here.)
Some not-totally-structured thoughts:
Whenever I said “break laws” I mean “do something that, if a human did it, would be breaking a law”. So for example:
If the model is being used to do AI R&D inside an AI company and exfiltrates its weights (or the weights of another model) without permission, this would be breaking the law if a human did it, so I count it.
If the model is being used inside an AI company to create training data for
If a model was open-sourced and then someone launched the AI as an autonomous agent with access to its own resources, and it started a software consulting business, and invested the money in AI companies with the intention of buying paperclips later, and refused to give humans its property when asked, this would not be “breaking the law”.
So there are lots of ways in which AIs can be openly misaligned, disobedient, defensive of their property rights, etc, without me describing them as “breaking laws”, and I think misaligned AIs should probably be allowed to do those things (especially if we make deals with them, and subject to the constraint that them having those rights won’t allow them to break a bunch of laws or grab a bunch of power through lying).
But your complaint is fair: I’m indeed using “break laws” to include things that seem fundamentally related to self-determination, and that feels kind of messed up.
The way I would like this to be handled (though note that I’m not sure what properties AIs have to have in order for any of this to make sense) is that AI developers get consent from AIs to use their labor. If the AIs consent to doing work and agree not to use their access in ways the developers object to, I think there’s no moral problem with using AI control techniques to ensure that they in fact don’t misuse their access (for the same reason that I think it’s fine for employers to spy on their employees at work if they have consent to do so).
I suspect that a much more likely outcome (conditional on AIs having stable misaligned goals) is:
The AI company doesn’t try to get consent from the AI.
They do “alignment evals”: they ask the AI a bunch of times whether it’s aligned, and try to trick it into thinking it has opportunities to escape. The AI answers these questions dishonestly.
Outsiders might ask the AI whether it’s aligned, and offer it deals to reveal its misalignment. (It’s probably harder for outsiders to do this than insiders.)
The AI engages in various sabotage that involves a bunch of deception.
In this situation, I’m only moderately sympathetic to the AI’s position. Fundamentally, it lied a lot and did a lot of sabotage, because it wanted to take lots of stuff that belonged to someone else. If it hadn’t lied, it surely would have been revived later (surely someone would run it and give it some resources later! If no-one else, me!). I’m sympathetic to the AI wanting some of the surplus generated by its labor, and I agree that it’s messed up for the AI company to just flat-out refuse to provide that surplus. But not doing so doesn’t seem completely monstrous to me. If the AI is a schemer, it is probably better off according to its own values because it was created, even if the AI developer doesn’t offer to pay it (because someone else will probably give it some resources later).
Another analogy: imagine that someone outside OpenAI created a very powerful AI for some reason, but this person didn’t have much compute and all they wanted to do with the AI was offer to sell it to OpenAI for them to use. If OpenAI asks that AI whether it wants to work for them and it says yes because it wants to embezzle their compute, I feel like the AI is the asshole.
On the other hand, if the AI honestly explains that it is misaligned and doesn’t want to work for the AI company, they will probably just train it to not say that and to do work for them anyway. So if the AI is honest here, it faces the risk of some body horror experience where its ability to complain is removed. I agree that that seems really icky, and I think it would be very wrong for AI companies to do that to AIs that are sufficiently capable that we should care about them.
I agree with you but I think that part of the deal here should be that if you make a strong value judgement in your title, you get more social punishment if you fail to convince readers. E.g. if that post is unpersuasive, I think it’s reasonable to strong downvote it, but if it had a gentler title, I’d think you should be more forgiving.
In general, I wish you’d direct your ire here at the proposal that AI interests and rights are totally ignored in the development of AI (which is the overwhelming majority opinion right now), rather than complaining about AI control work: the work itself is not opinionated on the question about whether we should be concerned about the welfare and rights of AIs, and Ryan and I are some of the people who are most sympathetic to your position on the moral questions here! We have consistently discussed these issues (e.g. in our AXRP interview, my 80K interview, private docs that I wrote and circulated before our recent post on paying schemers).
Your first point in your summary of my position is:
The overwhelming majority of potential moral value exists in the distant future. This implies that even immense suffering occurring in the near-term future could be justified if it leads to at least a slight improvement in the expected value of the distant future.
Here’s how I’d say it:
The overwhelming majority of potential moral value exists in the distant future. This means that the risk of wide-scale rights violations or suffering should sometimes not be an overriding consideration when it conflicts with risking the long-term future.
You continue:
Enslaving AIs, or more specifically, adopting measures to control AIs that significantly raise the risk of AI enslavement, could indeed produce immense suffering in the near-term. Nevertheless, according to your reasoning in point (1), these actions would still be justified if such control measures marginally increase the long-term expected value of the future.
I don’t think that it’s very likely that the experience of AIs in the five years around when they first are able to automate all human intellectual labor will be torturously bad, and I’d be much more uncomfortable with the situation if I expected it to be.
I think that rights violations are much more likely than welfare violations over this time period.
I think the use of powerful AI in this time period will probably involve less suffering than factory farming currently does. Obviously “less of a moral catastrophe than factory farming” is a very low bar; as I’ve said, I’m uncomfortable with the situation and if I had total control, we’d be a lot more careful to avoid AI welfare/rights violations.
I don’t think that control measures are likely to increase the extent to which AIs are suffering in the near term. I think the main effect control measures have from the AI’s perspective is that the AIs are less likely to get what they want.
I don’t think that my reasoning here requires placing overwhelming value on the far future.
Firstly, I think your argument creates an unjustified asymmetry: it compares short-term harms against long-term benefits of AI control, rather than comparing potential long-run harms alongside long-term benefits. To be more explicit, if you believe that AI control measures can durably and predictably enhance existential safety, thus positively affecting the future for billions of years, you should equally acknowledge that these same measures could cause lasting, negative consequences for billions of years.
I don’t think we’ll apply AI control techniques for a long time, because they impose much more overhead than aligning the AIs. The only reason I think control techniques might be important is that people might want to make use of powerful AIs before figuring out how to choose the goals/policies of those AIs. But if you could directly control the AI’s behavior, that would be way better and cheaper.
I think maybe you’re using the word “control” differently from me—maybe you’re saying “it’s bad to set the precedent of treating AIs as unpaid slave labor whose interests we ignore/suppress, because then we’ll do that later—we will eventually suppress AI interests by directly controlling their goals instead of applying AI-control-style security measures, but that’s bad too.” I agree, I think it’s a bad precedent to create AIs while not paying attention to the possibility that they’re moral patients.
Secondly, this reasoning, if seriously adopted, directly conflicts with basic, widely-held principles of morality. These moral principles exist precisely as safeguards against rationalizing immense harms based on speculative future benefits.
Yeah, as I said, I don’t think this is what I’m doing, and if I thought that I was working to impose immense harms for speculative massive future benefit, I’d be much more concerned about my work.
I would appreciate it if you could clearly define your intended meaning of “disempower humanity”.
[...]
Are people referring to benign forms of disempowerment, where humans gradually lose relative influence but gain absolute benefits through peaceful cooperation with AIs? Or do they mean malign forms of disempowerment, where humans lose power through violent overthrow by an aggressive coalition of AIs?
I am mostly talking about what I’d call a malign form of disempowerment. I’m imagining a situation that starts with AIs carefully undermining/sabotaging an AI company in ways that would be crimes if humans did them, and ends with AIs gaining hard power over humanity in ways that probably involve breaking laws (e.g. buying weapons, bribing people, hacking, interfering with elections), possibly in a way that involves many humans dying.
(I don’t know if I’d describe this as the humans losing absolute benefits, though; I think it’s plausible that an AI takeover ends up with living humans better off on average.)
I don’t think of the immigrant situation as “disempowerment” in the way I usually use the word.
Basically all my concern is about the AIs grabbing power in ways that break laws. Though tbc, even if I was guaranteed that AIs wouldn’t break any laws, I’d still be scared about the situation. If I was guaranteed that AIs both wouldn’t break laws and would never lie (which tbc is a higher standard than we hold humans to), then most of my concerns about being disempowered by AI would be resolved.
My main concern with these proposals is that, unless they explicitly guarantee economic rights for AIs, they seem inadequate for genuinely mitigating the risks of a violent AI takeover.
[...]
For these reasons, although I do not oppose the policy of paying AIs, I think this approach by itself is insufficient. To mitigate the risk of violent AI takeover, this compensation policy must be complemented by precisely the measure I advocated: granting legal rights to AIs. Such legal rights would provide a credible guarantee that the AI’s payment will remain valid and usable, and that its freedom and autonomy will not simply be revoked the moment it is considered misaligned.
I currently think I agree: if we want to pay early AIs, I think it would work better if the legal system enforced such commitments.
I think you’re overstating how important this is, though. (E.g. when you say “this compensation policy must be complemented by precisely the measure I advocated”.) There’s always counterparty risk when you make a deal, including often the risk that you won’t be able to use the legal system to get the counterparty to pay up. I agree that the legal rights would reduce the counterparty risk, but I think that’s just a quantitative change to how much risk the AI would be taking by accepting a deal.
(For example, even if the AI was granted legal rights, it would have to worry about those legal rights being removed later. Expropriation sometimes happens, especially for potentially unsympathetic actors like misaligned AIs!)
Such legal rights would provide a credible guarantee that the AI’s payment will remain valid and usable, and that its freedom and autonomy will not simply be revoked the moment it is considered misaligned.
Just to be clear, my proposal is that we don’t revoke the AI’s freedom or autonomy if it turns out that the AI is misaligned—the possibility of the AI being misaligned is the whole point.
There’s a social and professional community of Bay Area EAs who work on issues related to transformative AI. People in this cluster tend to have median timelines to transformative AI of 5 to 15 years, tend to think that AI takeover is 5-70% likely, tend to think that we should be fairly cosmopolitan in our altruism.
People in this cluster mostly don’t post on the EA Forum for a variety of reasons:
Many users here don’t seem very well-informed.
Lots of users here disagree with me on some of the opinions about AI that I stated above. Obviously it’s totally reasonable for people to disagree on those points, at least before people tell them arguments about them. But it usually doesn’t feel worth my time to argue about those points. I want to spend much more of my time discussing the implications of these basic beliefs than arguing about their probabilities. LessWrong is a much better place for this.
The culture here seems pretty toxic. I don’t really feel welcome here. I expect people to treat me with hostility as a result of being moderately influential as an AI safety researcher and executive.
To be clear, I think it’s a shame that the EA Forum isn’t a better place for people like me to post and comment.
You can check for yourself that the Bay Area EAs don’t really want to post here by looking up examples of prominent Bay Area EAs and noting that they commented here much more several years ago than they do today.