I think these judgements would benefit from more concreteness: that rather than proposing a dichotomy of “capabilities research” (them, Bad) and “alignment research” (us, Good), you could be more specific about what kinds of work you want to see more and less of.
I agree that (say) Carmack and Sutton are doing a bad thing by declaring a goal to “build AGI” while dismissing the reasons that this is incredibly dangerous. But the thing that makes infohazard concerns so fraught is that there’s a lot of work that potentially affects our civilization’s trajectory into the machine intelligence transition in complicated ways, which makes it hard to draw a boundary around “trusted alignment researchers” in a principled and not self-serving way that doesn’t collapse into “science and technology is bad”.
We can agree that OpenAI as originally conceived was a bad idea. What about the people working on music generation? That’s unambiguously “capabilities”, but it’s also not particularly optimized at ending the world that way “AGI for AGI’s sake” projects are. If that’s still bad even though music generation isn’t going to end the world (because it’s still directing attention and money into AI, increasing the incentive to build GPUs, &c.), where do you draw the line? Some of the researchers I cited in my most recent post are working on “build[ing] better models of primate visual cognition”. Is that wrong? Should Judea Pearl not have published? Turing? Charles Babbage?
In asking these obnoxious questions, I’m not trying to make a reductio ad absurdum of caring about risk, or proposing an infinitely slippery slope where our only choices are between max accelerationism and a destroy-all-computers Butlerian Jihad. I just think it’s important to notice that “Stop thinking about AI” kind of does amount to a Butlerian Jihad (and that publishing and thinking are not unrelated)?
I think I’m judging that schoolwork that’s sufficiently similar to the kind of intellectual work that I want to do anyway (or that I can otherwise get selfish benefit out of) gets its cost discounted. (It doesn’t have to be exactly the same.) And that commuting on the train with a seat is 70% similar to library time. (I wouldn’t even consider a car commute.)
For the fall semester, I’d be looking at “Real Analysis II”, “Probability Models”, “Applied and Computational Linear Algebra”, and (wait for it …) “Queer Literatures and Media”.
That schedule actually seems … pretty good? “Real Analysis II” with Prof. Schuster is the course I actually want to take, as a legitimate learning resource and challenge, but the other two math courses don’t seem worthless and insulting. “Queer Literatures and Media” does seem worthless and insulting, but might present an opportunity to troll the professor, or fodder for my topic-relevant blog and unfinished novella about a young woman hating going to SFSU.
As for judgement, I think I’m integrating a small judgement-density over a large support of time and Society. The immediate trigger for me even considering this might have been that people were arguing about school and Society on Twitter in way that brought up such rage and resentment in me. Somehow, I think I would be more at peace if I could criticize schooling from the position of ”… and I have a math degree” rather than ”… so I didn’t finish.” That peace definitely wouldn’t be worth four semesters, but it might be worth two.