Interesting and nice to read!
Do you think the following is right?
The larger the Upside-focused Colonist Curse, the fewer resources agents caring about suffering will control overall and the smaller the risks of conflicts causing S-risks?
This may balance out the effect that the larger the Upside-focused Colonist Curse, the more neglected S-risks are.
High Upside-focused Colonist Curse produces fewer S-risks at the same time as making them more neglected.
Maxime Riché 🔸
Karma: 178
Longtermist implications of aliens Space-Faring Civilizations—Introduction
Thinking About Propensity Evaluations
A Taxonomy Of AI System Evaluations
[Question] What are the strategic implications if aliens and Earth civilizations produce similar utilities?
Scaling of AI training runs will slow down after GPT-5
Thanks for your response!
Yet, I am still not clearly convinced that my reading doesn’t make sense. Here are some comments:
“respondents were very uncertain”
This seems to be, at the same time, the reason why you could want to diversify your portfolio of interventions for reducing X-risks. And the reason why someone could want to improve such estimates (of P(Nth scenario|X-risk)). But it doesn’t seem to be a strong reason to discard the conclusion of the survey (It would be, if we had more reliable information elsewhere).“there’s overlap between the scenarios”:
I am unsure, but it seems that the overlaps are not that big overall. Especially, the overlap between {1,2,3} and {4,5} doesn’t seem huge. (I also wonder if these overlaps also illustrate that you could reduce X-risks using a broader range of interventions (than just “AI alignment” and “AI governance”))
The “Superintelligence” scenario (Bostrom, 2014)
Part 2 of “What failure looks like” (Christiano, 2019)
Part 1 of “What failure looks like” (Christiano, 2019)
War (Dafoe, 2018)
Misuse (Karnofsky, 2016)
Other existential catastrophe scenarios.
“no 1-1 mapping between “fields” and risk scenarios”
Sure, this would benefit from having a more precise model.“Priority comparison of interventions is better than high-level comparisons”
Right. High-level comparisons are so much cheaper to do, that it seems worth it to stay at that level for now.
The point I am especially curious about is the following:
- Is this survey pointing to the fact that the importance of working on “Technical AI alignment”, “AI governance”, “Cooperative AI” and “Misuse limitation” are all within one OOM?
By importance here I mean, the importance as in the ITN framework of 80k, not the overall priority, which should include neglectedness, tractabilities and looking at object-level interventions.
Very useful :) Thanks!
I am confused by this survey. Taken at face value, working on improving Cooperation would only be x2 less impactful than working on hard AI alignment (only looking at the importance of the problem). And working on partial/naive alignment would be as impactful as working on AI alignment (looking only at the importance).
Does that make sense?(I make a bunch of assumptions to come up with these values. The starting point is the likelihood of the 5-6 X-risks scenarios. Then I associate each scenario with a field (AI alignment, naive AI alignment, Cooperation) that reduces its likelihood. Then I produce the value above, and they stay similar even if I assume a 2-step model where some scenarios happen before others. Google sheet)
Thanks for this clarification! I guess the “capability increase over time around and after reaching human level” is more important than the “GDP increase over time” to look at how hard alignment is. It’s likely why I assumed takeoff meant the former. Now I wonder if there is a term for “capability increase over time around and after reaching human level”...
Reading Eli’s piece/writing this review persuaded me to be more sceptical of Paul style continuous takeoff[6] and more open to discontinuous takeoff; AI may simply not transform the economy much until it’s capable of taking over the world[7].
From the post we don’t get information about the acceleration rate of AI capabilities but on the impact on the economy. This argument is thus against slow takeoff with economic consequences but not against slow takeoff without much economic consequences.
So updating from that towards a discontinuous takeoff doesn’t seem right. You should be updating from slow takeoff with economic consequences to slow takeoff without economic consequences.
Does that make sense?
Sorry if that’s not clear.
Are the reformulations in the initial summary helping? The second bullet point is the most relevant.