Graduate student at Johns Hopkins. Looking for entry level work, feel free to message me about any opportunities!
Dylan Richardson
Karma: 219
A Pessimistic Perspective on Animal Welfare Social Change
Due to Value Lock-in, TAI poses a time constraint for farmed animal social progress.
I do not expect most issues to be resolved before this time, due to technological limitations, heightened barriers to social change relative to historic movements, and increasing developing world meat consumption.
If we open this up to wild animals rather than just farmed, net-negative outcomes are much more assured.
I do tend to favor longer AGI/TAI timelines than many for roughly these reasons. But I don’t think you are exactly right about the AI data access trend. For one, whether or not me or Americans at large are “happy to give an ASI full autonomous power to gather such biomedical data”, China will be.
I tentatively I expect capabilities with real-world economic importance to come to some extent in the US as well, even if the most radical and transformative stuff requires further integration into the physical world for modeling. And at that point there may simply be a iterative process of greater and greater integration, as public perception improves and dependence increases. The complication here is moral backlash of some sort, which I note you’ve written about before. I agree that this is plausible, I simply wouldn’t call it probable. Things look more bi-modal to me; most likely we get the outcome I’ve described above (mild harms could still be disregarded by China), or we get a longer slow down before curing aging.
Semantic quibble: I think most people, myself included, simply define ASI as either encompassing those capabilities or being sufficient at recursive self-improvement such it will possess those capabilities in short order.
If your point is primarily that the existing AI paradigm is inadequate, I would tend to agree. There’s also a distinct question of what an intelligence explosion looks like; it may well be that tedious real-world experimentation is necessary for these sorts of biomedical advances, which takes time. That too is a compelling possibility; but I would expect it in a decade at most and certainly quicker than human R&D can advance.
It might genuinely be the time to boycott Chat GPT and start campaigns targeting corporate partners. But this isn’t yet obvious. Even if so, what would be the appropriate concrete and reasonable asks? I think there is a bit of epistemic crisis emerging at the moment. If there’s a case to be made, it needs to be made sooner rather than latter. And then we need coordination.
I found this Peter Wildeford piece helpful. My rough understanding now is that it was (implicitly?) rejecting “lawful use”, especially within classified contexts, that was the contentious bit all along.
But I’m still uncertain about the extent these contracts can be renegotiated in the future, when capabilities evolve. As well as the extent that black-swan type future capabilities could be “lawfully” used secretly, under classification? And presumably the nature of classified uses will kept secret from Open AI as well?
I am still confused about what exactly Open AI is requiring here and how (or if) it diverges substantively from Anthropic’s contract. Is this merely a symbolic victory for the DOW? Or is the language about “lawful use” allowing a back door somehow?
Kudos for writing maybe the best article I’ve seen making this argument. I’ll focus on the “catastrophic replacement” idea. I endorse what @Charlie_Guthmann said, but it goes further.
We don’t have reason to be especially confident of the AI sentience y/n binary (I agree it is quite plausible, but definitely not as probable as you seem to claim). But you are also way overconfident that they will have minds roughly analogous to our own and not way stranger. They would not “likely go on to build their own civilization”, let alone “colonize the cosmos”, when there is (random guess) a 50% chance that they have only episodic mental states that perhaps form, emerge and end with discrete goals. Or simply fleeting bursts of qualia. Or just spurts of horrible agony that only subside with positive human feedback, where scheming is not even conceivable. Or that the AI constitutes many discrete minds, one enormous utility-monster mind, or just a single mind that’s relatively analogous to the human pleasure/suffering scale.
It could nonetheless end up being the case that once “catastrophic replacement” happens, ASI(s) fortuitously adopt the correct moral theory (total hedonistic utilitarianism btw!) and go on to maximize value, but I consider this less likely to come about from either rationality or the nature of ASI technology in question. The reason is roughly that there are many of us with different minds, which are under a constant flux due to changing culture and technology. A tentative analogy: consider human moral progress like sand in an hourglass; eventually it falls to the bottom. AIs may come in all shapes and sizes, like sand grains and pebbles. They may never fall into the correct moral theory by whatever process it is that could (I hope) eventually drive human moral progress to a utopian conclusion.
I accept that political donations and activism are among the best ways to do good as an individual.
But it is less obvious that EA as an academic discipline and social movement has the analytical frameworks that suit it to politics—we have progress studies and the abundance movement for that. Mainly, I think there is a big difference between consensus-building among experts or altruistically minded individuals and in the political sphere of the mass-public.
It is of course necessary for political donations to be analyzed as trade offs against donations to other cause areas. And there’s a lot of research that needs doing on the effectiveness of campaign donations and protest movements in achieving expected outcomes. And certain cause areas definitely have issue-specific reasons to do political work.
But I wouldn’t want to see an “EA funds for Democrats” or a “EAs Against Trump” campaign.
I don’t have a good data source on hand, but my understanding is that pollution from car travel is particularly harmful to local air quality. Whereas, for instance, emissions from plane travel less so.
But yes, I assume some portion of Giving Green’s grantees do work that benefit air quality at least second hand. It could be included in the calculator as a harm but just directed to Giving Green as well.
Yes, you are probably right. I just threw that out as a stand-in for what I’m looking for. Ending all factory farming is too high a bar (and might just happen due to paper clipping instead!).
Maybe 10-20x-ing donor numbers is closer? I’d reference survey data instead, but public opinions are already way ahead of actual motivations. But maybe “cited among top 10 moral problems of the day” would work. Could also be numbers of vegans.
I think that is both correct and interesting as a proposition.
But the topic as phrased seems more likely to mire it in more timelines debate. Rather than this proposition, which is a step removed from:
1. What timelines and probability distributions are correct
2. Are EAs correctly calibrated
And only then do we get to
3. EAs are “failing to do enough work aimed at longer than median cases”.
- arguably my topic “Long timelines suggest significantly different approaches than short timelines” is between 2 & 3
Perhaps “Long timelines suggest significantly different approaches than short timelines” is more direct and under discussed?
I think median EA AI timelines are actually OK, it’s more that certain orgs and individuals (like AI 2027) have tended toward extremity in one way or another.
I mean all of the above. I don’t want to restrict it to one typology of harm, just anything affecting the long-term future via AI. Which includes not just X-risk, but value-lock in, s-risks and multi-agent scenarios as well. And making extrapolations from Musk’s willingness to directly impose his personal values, not just current harms.
Side note: there is no particular reason to complicate it by including both Open AI and Deep Mind, they just seemed like good comparisons in a way Nvidia and Deepseek aren’t. So let’s say just Open AI.
I would be very surprised if this doesn’t split discussion at least 60⁄40.
Good topic, but I think it would need to be opened to plant based as well and reduced to something like “more than 60%” to split debate adequately.
“Grok/xAI is a greater threat to AI Safety than either Open AI or Google DeepMind”
- (Controversial because the later presumably have a better chance of reaching AGI first. I take the question to mean “which one, everything else being equal and investment/human capital not being redistributed, would you prefer to not exist?”
Mostly I just want a way to provoke more discussion on the relative harms of Grok as a model, which has fallen into the “so obvious we don’t mention it” category. I would welcome better framings.)
“Policy or institutional approaches to AI Safety are currently more effective than technical alignment work”
Really cool! Easy to use and looks great. Some feedback:
The word “offsetting” seems to have bad PR. But I quite like “Leave no harm” and “a clean slate”. I think the general idea could be really compelling to certain parts of the population. There is at least some subsection of the population that thinks about charity in a “guilty conscious” sense. Maybe guilt is a good framing, especially since it is more generalizable here than most charities are capable of eliciting.I’m certainly not an expert on this, but I wonder if this could have particular appeal to religious groups? The concept of “Ahimsa” in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism seems relevant.
Last suggestion: Air pollution may be a good additional category of harms. I’m not sure what the best charity target would be though, given that it is hyper regional. Medical research? Could also add second-hand cigarette smoke to that.
Seems like the best bet is to make it as comprehensive as possible, without overly diluting the most important and evidence backed stuff like farmed animal welfare.
“Mass Animal Welfare social change has at least a 40% chance of occurring before TAI”
(Social change, not necessarily material or policy change—hard to specify what qualifies, but maybe quadrupling the number of individual donors, or the sizes and frequency of protests.)
Is he going to starve if I stop reading posts?! I’m too scared to leave the forum now.