AI used to be a science. In the old days (back when AI didn’t work very well), people were attempting to develop a working theory of cognition. Those scientists didn’t succeed, and those days are behind us. For most people...
I’ve been citing AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities to explain why the situation with AI looks lethally dangerous to me. But that post is relatively long, and emphasizes specific open technical problems over “the basics”. Here are 10 things...
Here’s two different ways an AI can turn out unfriendly: You somehow build an AI that cares about “making people happy”. In training, it tells people jokes and buys people flowers and offers people an ear when they need one....
(Published in TIME on March 29.) An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” This 6-month moratorium would be better...
Status: This was a response to a draft of Holden’s cold take “AI safety seems hard to measure”. It sparked a further discussion, that Holden recently posted a summary of. The follow-up discussion ended up focusing on some issues in...
Meta This post is an attempt to gesture at a class of AI notkilleveryoneism (alignment) problem that seems to me to go largely unrecognized. E.g., it isn’t discussed (or at least I don’t recognize it) in the recent plans written...
