Looking at these, I feel like they are subquestions of “how do you design a good society that can handle technological development”—most of it is not AI-specific or CAIS-specific.
It is intentional that not all the problems are technical problems—for example, I expect that not tackling unemployment due to AI might indirectly make you a lot less safe (it seems prudent to not be in a civial war or war when you are attempting to finish building AGI). However, you are right that the list might nevertheless be too broad (and too loosely tied to AI).
Anyway: As a smaller point, I feel that most of the listed problems will get magnified as you introduce more AI services, or they might gain important twists. As a larger point: Am I correct to understand you as implying that “technical AI alignment researchers should primarily focus on other problems” (modulo qualifications)? My intuition is that this doesn’t follow, or at least that we might disagree on the degree to which this needs to be qualified to be true. However, I have not yet thought about this enough to be able to elaborate more right now :(.
A bookmark that seems relevant is the following prompt:
Conditional on your AI system never turning into an agent-like AGI, how is “not dying and not losing some % of your potential utility because of AI” different from “how do you design a good society that can handle the process of more and more things getting automated”?
(This should go with many disclaimers, first among those the fact that this is a prompt, not an implicit statement that I fully endorse.)
Am I correct to understand you as implying that “technical AI alignment researchers should primarily focus on other problems” (modulo qualifications)?
Kind of? I think it’s more like “these are indeed problems, and someone should focus on them, but I wouldn’t call it technical AI alignment” (and as a result, I wouldn’t call people working on them “technical AI alignment researchers”). For many of these problems, if I wanted to find people to work on them, I would not look for AI researchers (and instead look for economists, political theorists, etc).
Like, I kind of wish this document had been written without AI / AI safety researchers in mind.
It is intentional that not all the problems are technical problems—for example, I expect that not tackling unemployment due to AI might indirectly make you a lot less safe (it seems prudent to not be in a civial war or war when you are attempting to finish building AGI). However, you are right that the list might nevertheless be too broad (and too loosely tied to AI).
Anyway: As a smaller point, I feel that most of the listed problems will get magnified as you introduce more AI services, or they might gain important twists. As a larger point: Am I correct to understand you as implying that “technical AI alignment researchers should primarily focus on other problems” (modulo qualifications)? My intuition is that this doesn’t follow, or at least that we might disagree on the degree to which this needs to be qualified to be true. However, I have not yet thought about this enough to be able to elaborate more right now :(. A bookmark that seems relevant is the following prompt:
Conditional on your AI system never turning into an agent-like AGI, how is “not dying and not losing some % of your potential utility because of AI” different from “how do you design a good society that can handle the process of more and more things getting automated”?
(This should go with many disclaimers, first among those the fact that this is a prompt, not an implicit statement that I fully endorse.)
Kind of? I think it’s more like “these are indeed problems, and someone should focus on them, but I wouldn’t call it technical AI alignment” (and as a result, I wouldn’t call people working on them “technical AI alignment researchers”). For many of these problems, if I wanted to find people to work on them, I would not look for AI researchers (and instead look for economists, political theorists, etc).
Like, I kind of wish this document had been written without AI / AI safety researchers in mind.