I’ve been thinking about what research projects I should work on, and I’ve posted my current view. Naturally, I think these are also good projects for other people to work on as well.
Brief summaries of the projects I find most promising:
Elaborating on apprenticeship learning. Imitating human behavior seems especially promising as a scalable approach to AI control, but there are many outstanding problems.
Efficiently using human feedback. The limited availability of human feedback may be a serious bottleneck for realistic approaches to AI control.
Explaining human judgments and disagreements. My preferred approach to AI control requires humans to understand AIs’ plans and beliefs. We don’t know how to solve the analogous problem for humans.
The post briefly discusses where I am coming from, and links to a good deal more clarification. I’m always interested in additional thoughts and criticisms, since changing my views on these questions would directly influence what I spend my time on.
My research priorities for AI control
I’ve been thinking about what research projects I should work on, and I’ve posted my current view. Naturally, I think these are also good projects for other people to work on as well.
Brief summaries of the projects I find most promising:
Elaborating on apprenticeship learning. Imitating human behavior seems especially promising as a scalable approach to AI control, but there are many outstanding problems.
Efficiently using human feedback. The limited availability of human feedback may be a serious bottleneck for realistic approaches to AI control.
Explaining human judgments and disagreements. My preferred approach to AI control requires humans to understand AIs’ plans and beliefs. We don’t know how to solve the analogous problem for humans.
Designing feedback mechanisms for reinforcement learning. A grab bag of problems, united by a need for proxies of hard-to-optimize, implicit objectives.