I am a psychotherapist helping people working on AI safety.
Check out my website to learn more about me or book a session.
If you would like to discuss with me other ways to get professional help, you can also book a short call on my website.
I also make community events for senior AI governance specialists.
Can you elaborate on your comment?
It seems so intriguing to me, and I would love to learn more about “Why it’s a bad strategy if our AGI timeline is 5 years or less”?
It does, and it causes a lot of problems, so I would prefer to avoid such problems with AIs
Also, I believe that an advanced AI will be much more capable in terms of deception and manipulation than an average human
First, your article is very insightful and well-structured, and totally like it.
But there is one thing that bugs me.
I am a person new to AI alignment field, and recently, I realized (maybe by mistake) that there is very hard to find a long-term financially stable full-time job in AI field-building.
For me, it basically means that only a tiny amount of people consider AI alignment important enough to pay money to decrease P(doom). And at the same time, here we are talking about possibility of doom within next 10 or 20 years. For me it is all a bit crazy
I also think that sooner or later, when AIs will become more and more capable, and, either some large Chernobyl-like tragedy caused by AI will happen, or some AI will become so powerful that it will horrify people. In my opinion, probability of that is very high. I already see how ChatGPT spread some fear. And fear might spread like a wildfire. If it will happen too late for governments to react thoughtfully, it will introduce a large amount of risk and uncertainty. In my opinion, too much risk and uncertainty.
So, in my opinion, even if we will educate the public and promote government regulation, and if AGI will appear before 2030, then government policies might suck. But if we will not do it, they might suck much more and it is even more dangerous.
Your comment is somewhat along the lines of the stoic philosophy.
Thanks. I am not a native English speaker, and I use GPT-4 to help me catch mistakes, but it seems like it’s not perfect :)
Thanks for sharing your experience. My experience is that talking with non-AI safety people is similar to talks about global warming. If someone tells me about that, I say that this is an important issue, but I honestly don’t invest that much effort to fight against it.
This is my experience, and yours might be different.
ChatGPT was recently launched, and it is so powerful, that it made me think that the problem of a misuse of a powerful AI It’s a very powerful tool. No one really knows how to use it, but I am sure, we will soon see it used as a tool for unpleasant things
But I also see more and more of perception of AI as a live entity with agency. People are having conversations with ChatGPT as with a human
This is an amazing overview of the field. Even if it won’t collect tons of upvotes, it is super important, and saved me many hours. Thank you.
I absolutely agree with the conclusion. Everything is moving so fast.
I hope, these advances will cause massive interest in the alignment problem from all sorts of actors, and even if OpenAI are talking about safety (and recently they started talking about it quite often) in a large part because of PR reasons, it still means that they think, society is concerned about the progress which is a good sign.
These problems are not unique to AI safety, but they are present way more often with my clients working on AI safety, than with my other clients.
Thanks for your elaborate response!
But why do you think that this project will take so much time? Why can’t it be implemented faster?
The reactor meltdown on a Soviet submarine was not posing an existential threat. In the worst case, it would be a little version of Chernobyl. We might compare it to an AI which causes some serious problems, like a stock market crash, but not existential ones. And the movie is not a threat at all.
”The question is how plausible it is to generate situations that are scary enough to be useful, but under enough control to be safe.”
That is a great summary of what I wanted to say!
I tried to use the exact quotes while describing things that they sent me because it’s easy for me to misrepresent their actions, and I don’t want tit to be the case.
Thanks. I got a bit clickbaity in the title.
Hi
In this post you asked to leave the names of therapists familiar with alignment.
I am such a therapist. I live in the UK. That’s my website.
I recently wrote a post about my experience as a therapist with clients working on AI safety. It might serve as indirect proof that I really have such clients.
This is tricky. May it exacerbate your problems?
Anyway. If there’s a chance I can helpful for you, let me know.
I believe we need a fire alarm.
People were scared of nuclear weapons since 1945, but no one restricted the arms race until The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961.
We know for sure that the crisis really scared both Soviet and US high commands, and the first document to restrict nukes was signed the next year, 1962.
What kind of fire alarm it might be? That is The Question.
I think an important thing to get people convinced of the importance of AI safety is to find proper “Gateway drug” ideas that already bother that person, so they are likely to accept this idea, and through it get interested in AI safety.
For example, if a person is concerned about the rights of minorities, you might tell them about how we don’t know how LLMs work, and this causes bias and discrimination, or how it will increase inequality.
If a person cares about privacy and is afraid of government surveillance, then you might tell them about how AI might make all these problems much worse.
Thank you! The idea of inter-temporal coordination looks interesting
Why do you think that it will not be competitive with other approaches?
For example, it took 10 years to sequence the first human genome. After nearly 7 years of work, another competitor started an alternative human genome project using completely another technology, and both projects were finished approximately at the same time.