At the 2024 LessWrong Community weekend I met somebody who I have been working with for perhaps 50 hours so far. They are better at certain programming related tasks than me, in a way provided utility. Before meeting them they where not even considering working on AI alignment related things. The conversation wen’t something like this:
Johannes: What are you working on. Other Person: Web development. What are you working on? Johannes: I am trying to understand intelligence such that we can build a system that is capable enough to prevent other misaligned AI’s from being build, and that we understand enough such that we can be sure that it wouldn’t kill us. [...] Why are you not working on it?
Other Person: (I forgot what he said) Johannes: Oh then now is the perfect time to start working on it. Other Person: So what are you actually doing. Johannes: (Describes some methodologies.) Other Person: (Questions whether these methodologies are actually good, and thinks about how they could be better.)
[...]
Actually this all happened after the event when traveling from the venue to the train station.
It doesn’t happen that often that I get something really good out of a random meeting. Most of them are bad. However, I think the most important thing I do to get something out is to just immediately talk about the things that I am interested in. This efficiently filters out people, either because they are not interested, or because they can’t talk it.
You can overdo this. Starting a conversation with “AI seems very powerful, I think it will likely destroy the world” can make other people feel awkward (I know from experience). However, the above formula of “what do you do” and then “and I do this” get’s to the point very quickly without inducing awkwardness.
Basically you can think of this as making random encounters (like walking back to the train station with randomly sampled people) non-random by always trying to steer any encounter such that it becomes useful.
At the 2024 LessWrong Community weekend I met somebody who I have been working with for perhaps 50 hours so far. They are better at certain programming related tasks than me, in a way provided utility. Before meeting them they where not even considering working on AI alignment related things. The conversation wen’t something like this:
Johannes: What are you working on.
Other Person: Web development. What are you working on?
Johannes: I am trying to understand intelligence such that we can build a system that is capable enough to prevent other misaligned AI’s from being build, and that we understand enough such that we can be sure that it wouldn’t kill us. [...] Why are you not working on it? Other Person: (I forgot what he said)
Johannes: Oh then now is the perfect time to start working on it.
Other Person: So what are you actually doing.
Johannes: (Describes some methodologies.)
Other Person: (Questions whether these methodologies are actually good, and thinks about how they could be better.)
[...]
Actually this all happened after the event when traveling from the venue to the train station.
It doesn’t happen that often that I get something really good out of a random meeting. Most of them are bad. However, I think the most important thing I do to get something out is to just immediately talk about the things that I am interested in. This efficiently filters out people, either because they are not interested, or because they can’t talk it.
You can overdo this. Starting a conversation with “AI seems very powerful, I think it will likely destroy the world” can make other people feel awkward (I know from experience). However, the above formula of “what do you do” and then “and I do this” get’s to the point very quickly without inducing awkwardness.
Basically you can think of this as making random encounters (like walking back to the train station with randomly sampled people) non-random by always trying to steer any encounter such that it becomes useful.