2. Why do you see communications as being as decoupled (rather, either that it is inherently or that it should be) from research as you currently do?
The things we need to communicate about right now are nowhere near the research frontier.
One common question we get from reporters, for example, is “why can’t we just unplug a dangerous AI?” The answer to this is not particularly deep and does not require a researcher or even a research background to engage on.
We’ve developed a list of the couple-dozen most common questions we are asked by the press and the general public and they’re mostly roughly on par with that one.
There is a separate issue of doing better at communicating about our research; MIRI has historically not done very well there. Part of it is that we were/are keeping our work secret on purpose, and part of it is that communicating is hard. To whatever extent it’s just about ‘communicating is hard,’ I would like to do better at the technical comms, but it is not my current highest priority.
Quickly chiming in to add that I can imagine there might be some research we could do that could be more instrumentally useful to comms/policy objectives. Unclear whether it makes sense for us to do anything like that, but it’s something I’m tracking.
The things we need to communicate about right now are nowhere near the research frontier.
One common question we get from reporters, for example, is “why can’t we just unplug a dangerous AI?” The answer to this is not particularly deep and does not require a researcher or even a research background to engage on.
We’ve developed a list of the couple-dozen most common questions we are asked by the press and the general public and they’re mostly roughly on par with that one.
There is a separate issue of doing better at communicating about our research; MIRI has historically not done very well there. Part of it is that we were/are keeping our work secret on purpose, and part of it is that communicating is hard. To whatever extent it’s just about ‘communicating is hard,’ I would like to do better at the technical comms, but it is not my current highest priority.
Quickly chiming in to add that I can imagine there might be some research we could do that could be more instrumentally useful to comms/policy objectives. Unclear whether it makes sense for us to do anything like that, but it’s something I’m tracking.