Source: original, but motivated by trying to ground WFLL1-type scenarios in what we already experience in the modern world, so heavily based on this. Also the original idea came from reading Neel Nanda’s “Bird’s Eye View of AI Alignment—Threat Models”
Intended audience: mainly policymakers
A common problem in the modern world is when incentives don’t match up with value being produced for society. For instance, corporations have an incentive to profit-maximise, which can lead to producing value for consumers, but can also involve less ethical strategies such as underpaying workers, regulatory capture, or tax avoidance. Laws & regulations are designed to keep behaviour like this in check, and this works fairly well most of the time. Some reasons for this are: (1) people have limited time/intelligence/resources to find and exploit loopholes in the law, (2) people usually follow societal and moral norms even if they’re not explicitly represented in law, and (3) the pace of social and technological change has historically been slow enough for policymakers to adapt laws & regulations to new circumstances. However, advancements in artificial intelligence might destabilise this balance. To return to the previous example, an AI tasked with maximising profit might be able to find loopholes in laws that humans would miss, they would have no particular reason to pay attention to societal norms, and they might be improving and becoming integrated with society at a rate which makes it difficult for policy to keep pace. The more entrenched AI becomes in our society, the worse these problems will get.
Please make more submissions! If EA orgs are looking for good metaculus prediction records, they’ll probably look for evidence of explanatory writing on AI as well. You can put large numbers of contest entries on your resume, to prove that you’re serious about explaining AI risk.
Source: original, but motivated by trying to ground WFLL1-type scenarios in what we already experience in the modern world, so heavily based on this. Also the original idea came from reading Neel Nanda’s “Bird’s Eye View of AI Alignment—Threat Models”
Intended audience: mainly policymakers
Please make more submissions! If EA orgs are looking for good metaculus prediction records, they’ll probably look for evidence of explanatory writing on AI as well. You can put large numbers of contest entries on your resume, to prove that you’re serious about explaining AI risk.