Eliezer, when you told Richard that your probability of a successful miracle is very low, you added the following note:
Though a lot of that is dominated, not by the probability of a positive miracle, but by the extent to which we seem unprepared to take advantage of it, and so would not be saved by one.
I don’t mean to ask for positive fairy tales when I ask: could you list some things you could see in the world that would cause you to feel that we were well-prepared to take advantage of one if we got one?
My obvious quick guess would be “I know of an ML project that made a breakthrough as impressive as GPT-3 and this is secret to the outer world, and the organization is keenly interested in alignment”. But I am also interested in broader and less obvious ones. For example if the folks around here had successfully made a covid vaccine I think that would likely require us to be in a much more competent and responsive situation. Alternatively if folks made other historic scientific breakthroughs guided by some model of how it helps prevent AI doom, I’d feel more like this power could be turned to relevant directions.
Anyway, these are some of the things I quickly generate, but I’m interested in what comes to your mind?
Eliezer, when you told Richard that your probability of a successful miracle is very low, you added the following note:
I don’t mean to ask for positive fairy tales when I ask: could you list some things you could see in the world that would cause you to feel that we were well-prepared to take advantage of one if we got one?
My obvious quick guess would be “I know of an ML project that made a breakthrough as impressive as GPT-3 and this is secret to the outer world, and the organization is keenly interested in alignment”. But I am also interested in broader and less obvious ones. For example if the folks around here had successfully made a covid vaccine I think that would likely require us to be in a much more competent and responsive situation. Alternatively if folks made other historic scientific breakthroughs guided by some model of how it helps prevent AI doom, I’d feel more like this power could be turned to relevant directions.
Anyway, these are some of the things I quickly generate, but I’m interested in what comes to your mind?