Russell is an entirely respectable and mainstream researcher, at one of the top CS departments. It’s striking that he’s now basically articulating something pretty close to the MIRI view. Can somebody comment on whether Russell has personally interacted with MIRI?
If MIRI’s work played a role in convincing people like Russell, that seems like an major accomplishment and demonstration that they have arrived as part of the academic research community. If Russell came to that conclusion on his own, MIRI should still get a fair bit of praise for getting there first and saying it before it was respectable.
In either case, my congratulations to the folks at MIRI and I will up my credence in them, going forwards. (They’ve been rising steadily in my estimation for the last several years; this is just one of the more dramatic bumps.)
Russell is an entirely respectable and mainstream researcher, at one of the top CS departments. It’s striking that he’s now basically articulating something pretty close to the MIRI view. Can somebody comment on whether Russell has personally interacted with MIRI?
If MIRI’s work played a role in convincing people like Russell, that seems like an major accomplishment and demonstration that they have arrived as part of the academic research community. If Russell came to that conclusion on his own, MIRI should still get a fair bit of praise for getting there first and saying it before it was respectable.
In either case, my congratulations to the folks at MIRI and I will up my credence in them, going forwards. (They’ve been rising steadily in my estimation for the last several years; this is just one of the more dramatic bumps.)
The 3rd edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach which came out in 2009, explains the intelligence explosion concept, cites Yudkowsky’s 2008 paper Artificial intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk, and specifically mentions friendly AI and the challenges involved in creating it.
So Russell has more or less agreed with MIRI on a lot of the key issues for quite some time now.
His textbook from 2009 mentions Yudkowsky and Omohundro by name, so he very likely is familiar with MIRI’s arguments.
He has.