I work on AI alignment, in order to solve problems of X-Risk. This is a very “negative” kind of objective.
Negatives are weird. Don’t do X, don’t be Y, don’t cause Z. They’re nebulous and sometimes hard to point at and move towards.
I hear a lot of a bunch of doom-y things these days. From the evangelicals, that this is the end times / end of days. From environmentalists that we are in a climate catastrophe. From politicians that we’re in a culture war / edging towards a civil war. From the EAs/Rationalists that we’re heading towards potential existential catastrophe (I do agree with this one).
I think cognition and emotion and relation can get muddied up with too much of negatives without things to balance them out. I don’t just want to prevent x-risk—I also want to bring about a super awesome future.
So I think personally I’m going to try to be more balanced in this regard, even in the small scale, by mixing in the things I’m wanting to move towards in addition to things I want to move away from.
In the futurist and long term communities, I want to endorse and hear more about technology developments that help bring about a more awesome future (longevity and materials science come to mind as concrete examples).
The Positive and the Negative
I work on AI alignment, in order to solve problems of X-Risk. This is a very “negative” kind of objective.
Negatives are weird. Don’t do X, don’t be Y, don’t cause Z. They’re nebulous and sometimes hard to point at and move towards.
I hear a lot of a bunch of doom-y things these days. From the evangelicals, that this is the end times / end of days. From environmentalists that we are in a climate catastrophe. From politicians that we’re in a culture war / edging towards a civil war. From the EAs/Rationalists that we’re heading towards potential existential catastrophe (I do agree with this one).
I think cognition and emotion and relation can get muddied up with too much of negatives without things to balance them out. I don’t just want to prevent x-risk—I also want to bring about a super awesome future.
So I think personally I’m going to try to be more balanced in this regard, even in the small scale, by mixing in the things I’m wanting to move towards in addition to things I want to move away from.
In the futurist and long term communities, I want to endorse and hear more about technology developments that help bring about a more awesome future (longevity and materials science come to mind as concrete examples).