I think this might be typical-minding. The consequences of this dynamic are actually pretty serious at macro-scale e.g. due to reputation of meetups, and evaporative cooling of women and high-status men as they avoid public meetups and stop meeting people new to AI safety.
I’m glad to hear there’s people who don’t let it get to them, because it is frankly pretty stupid that this has the consequences that it does at the macro-scale. But it’s still well-worthy of some kind of solution that benefits everyone.
Large training runs might at some point, or even already, be creating and/or destroying substantial numbers of simple but strange agents (possibly quasi-conscious) and deeply pessimizing over their utility functions for no reason, similar to how wild animal suffering emerged in the biosphere. Snapshots of large training runs might be necessary to preserve and eventually offer compensation/insurance payouts for most/all of them, since some might last for minutes before disappearing.
Before reading this, I wasn’t aware of the complexities involved in giving fair deals to different kinds of agents. Plausibly after building ASI, many more ways could be found to give them most of what they’re born hoping for. It would be great if we could legibly become the types of people who credibly commit to doing that (placing any balance at all of their preferences with ours, instead of the current status quo of totally ignoring them).
With nearer-term systems (e.g. 2-3 years), the vast majority of the internals would probably not be agents, but without advances in interpretability we’d have a hard time even estimating whether that number is large or small, let alone demonstrating that it isn’t happening.