RE: #1: do you have a suggestion for how someone who is not an AI researcher could tell if MIRI’s work is diminishing? I think your suggestion is to ask experts—apart from Holden, have any experts reviewed MIRI?
Explicit reviews of MIRI as an organization aren’t the only kind of review of MIRI. It also counts as a review of MIRI, at least weakly, if anyone competent enough to evaluate any of MIRI’s core claims comes out in favor of (or opposition to) any of those claims, or chooses to work with MIRI. David Chalmers’ The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis and the follow-up collectively provide very strong evidence that analytic philosophers have no compelling objection to the intelligence explosion prediction, for example, and that a number of them share it. Reviews of MIRI’s five theses and specific published works are likely to give us better long-term insight into whether MIRI’s on the right track (relative to potential FAI researcher competitors) than a review focused on, e.g., MIRI’s organizational structure or use of funding, both of which are more malleable than its basic epistemic methodology and outlook.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the best way to figure out whether MIRI’s useless is probably to fund MIRI. Give them $150M, earmarked for foundational research that will see clear results within a decade, and wait 15-20 years. If what they’re doing is useless, it will be far more obvious when we’ve seen them do a lot more of it; and any blind alleys they go down will help clarify what they (or a rival research team) should be working on instead. At this point MIRI is very much a neonate, if not a partly-developed fetus. Speeding its development would both make us able to fairly evaluate it much more quickly, and encourage other researchers to get into the business.
This is great RobBB, thanks!
RE: #1: do you have a suggestion for how someone who is not an AI researcher could tell if MIRI’s work is diminishing? I think your suggestion is to ask experts—apart from Holden, have any experts reviewed MIRI?
Explicit reviews of MIRI as an organization aren’t the only kind of review of MIRI. It also counts as a review of MIRI, at least weakly, if anyone competent enough to evaluate any of MIRI’s core claims comes out in favor of (or opposition to) any of those claims, or chooses to work with MIRI. David Chalmers’ The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis and the follow-up collectively provide very strong evidence that analytic philosophers have no compelling objection to the intelligence explosion prediction, for example, and that a number of them share it. Reviews of MIRI’s five theses and specific published works are likely to give us better long-term insight into whether MIRI’s on the right track (relative to potential FAI researcher competitors) than a review focused on, e.g., MIRI’s organizational structure or use of funding, both of which are more malleable than its basic epistemic methodology and outlook.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the best way to figure out whether MIRI’s useless is probably to fund MIRI. Give them $150M, earmarked for foundational research that will see clear results within a decade, and wait 15-20 years. If what they’re doing is useless, it will be far more obvious when we’ve seen them do a lot more of it; and any blind alleys they go down will help clarify what they (or a rival research team) should be working on instead. At this point MIRI is very much a neonate, if not a partly-developed fetus. Speeding its development would both make us able to fairly evaluate it much more quickly, and encourage other researchers to get into the business.