This maybe doesn’t make much difference for the rest of your comment, but just FWIW: the workshop you attended in Sept 2016 not part of the AIRCS series. It was a one-off experiment, funded by an FLI grant, called “CFAR for ML”, where we ran most of a standard CFAR workshop and then tacked on an additional day of AI alignment discussion at the end.
The AIRCS workshops have been running ~9 times/year since Feb 2018, have been evolving pretty rapidly, and in recent iterations involve a higher ratio of either AI risk content, or content about how cognitive biases etc. that seem to arise in discussion about AI risk in particular. They have somewhat smaller cohorts for more 1-on-1 conversation (~15 participants instead of 23). They are co-run with MIRI, which “CFAR for ML” was not. They have a slightly different team and a slightly different beast.
Which… doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have had most of the same perceptions if you’d come to a recent AIRCS! You might well have. From a distance perhaps all our workshops are pretty similar. And I can see calling “CFAR for ML” “AIRCS”, since it was in fact partially about AI risk and was aimed mostly at computer scientists, which is what “AIRCS” stands for. Still, we locally care a good bit of the distinctions between our programs, so I did want to clarify.
Thanks for the correction! Yes, from a distance the description of your workshops seem pretty similar. I thought the “CFAR for ML” was a prototype for AIRCS, and assumed it would have similar structure and format. Many of Arthur’s descriptions seemed familiar to my memories of the CFAR for ML workshop.
Hi Mark,
This maybe doesn’t make much difference for the rest of your comment, but just FWIW: the workshop you attended in Sept 2016 not part of the AIRCS series. It was a one-off experiment, funded by an FLI grant, called “CFAR for ML”, where we ran most of a standard CFAR workshop and then tacked on an additional day of AI alignment discussion at the end.
The AIRCS workshops have been running ~9 times/year since Feb 2018, have been evolving pretty rapidly, and in recent iterations involve a higher ratio of either AI risk content, or content about how cognitive biases etc. that seem to arise in discussion about AI risk in particular. They have somewhat smaller cohorts for more 1-on-1 conversation (~15 participants instead of 23). They are co-run with MIRI, which “CFAR for ML” was not. They have a slightly different team and a slightly different beast.
Which… doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have had most of the same perceptions if you’d come to a recent AIRCS! You might well have. From a distance perhaps all our workshops are pretty similar. And I can see calling “CFAR for ML” “AIRCS”, since it was in fact partially about AI risk and was aimed mostly at computer scientists, which is what “AIRCS” stands for. Still, we locally care a good bit of the distinctions between our programs, so I did want to clarify.
Thanks for the correction! Yes, from a distance the description of your workshops seem pretty similar. I thought the “CFAR for ML” was a prototype for AIRCS, and assumed it would have similar structure and format. Many of Arthur’s descriptions seemed familiar to my memories of the CFAR for ML workshop.