It seems like time to start focusing resources on a portfolio of serious prosaic alignment approaches, as well as effective interdisciplinary management. In my inside view, the highest-marginal-impact interventions involve making multiple different things go right simultaneously for the first AGIs, which is not trivial, and the stakes are astronomical.
Little clear progress has been made on provable alignment after over a decade of trying. My inside view is that it got privileged attention because the first people to take the problem seriously happened to be highly abstract thinkers. Then they defined the scope and expectations of the field, alienating other perspectives and creating a self-reinforcing trapped prior.
First, I think it’s ludicrous to say “Little clear progress has been made on provable alignment after over a decade of trying.” The progress is actually quite amazing—yes, we’re decades away from a solution to provable alignment, if one is possible at all, but not only has there been some really amazing and groundbreaking work coming out of MIRI, but you aren’t paying attention if you don’t see all of the contributions that work made to all of the questions which “prosaic alignment” is now trying to answer.
Second, “It seems like time to start focusing resources on a portfolio of serious prosaic alignment approaches,” is correct, but several years too late, given that it’s a majority of the work which is being done already.
It seems like time to start focusing resources on a portfolio of serious prosaic alignment approaches, as well as effective interdisciplinary management. In my inside view, the highest-marginal-impact interventions involve making multiple different things go right simultaneously for the first AGIs, which is not trivial, and the stakes are astronomical.
Little clear progress has been made on provable alignment after over a decade of trying. My inside view is that it got privileged attention because the first people to take the problem seriously happened to be highly abstract thinkers. Then they defined the scope and expectations of the field, alienating other perspectives and creating a self-reinforcing trapped prior.
First, I think it’s ludicrous to say “Little clear progress has been made on provable alignment after over a decade of trying.” The progress is actually quite amazing—yes, we’re decades away from a solution to provable alignment, if one is possible at all, but not only has there been some really amazing and groundbreaking work coming out of MIRI, but you aren’t paying attention if you don’t see all of the contributions that work made to all of the questions which “prosaic alignment” is now trying to answer.
Second, “It seems like time to start focusing resources on a portfolio of serious prosaic alignment approaches,” is correct, but several years too late, given that it’s a majority of the work which is being done already.