Any and all efforts should be welcome. That being said I have my qualms with academic research in this field.
Perhaps that most important thing we need in AI safety is public attention as to gain the ability to effectively regulate. Academia is terrible at bringing public attention to complex issues.
We need big theoretical leaps. Academia tends to make iterative measurable steps. In the past we saw imaginative figures like Einstein make big theoretical leaps and rise in academia. But I would argue that the combination of how academia works today (It is a dense rainforest of papers where few see the light) plus this particular field of AI safety (Measurable advancement requires AGI to test on) is uniquely bad at rising theoretical leaps to the top.
Academia is slooooooow.
I am scared we have moved from a world where we could sketch ideas out in pencil and gather feedback, to a world where we are writing in permanent marker. We have to quickly and collaboratively model 5 moves ahead. In my mind there is a meta problem of how we effectively mass collaborate, and academia is currently failing to do this.
Any and all efforts should be welcome. That being said I have my qualms with academic research in this field.
Perhaps that most important thing we need in AI safety is public attention as to gain the ability to effectively regulate. Academia is terrible at bringing public attention to complex issues.
We need big theoretical leaps. Academia tends to make iterative measurable steps. In the past we saw imaginative figures like Einstein make big theoretical leaps and rise in academia. But I would argue that the combination of how academia works today (It is a dense rainforest of papers where few see the light) plus this particular field of AI safety (Measurable advancement requires AGI to test on) is uniquely bad at rising theoretical leaps to the top.
Academia is slooooooow.
I am scared we have moved from a world where we could sketch ideas out in pencil and gather feedback, to a world where we are writing in permanent marker. We have to quickly and collaboratively model 5 moves ahead. In my mind there is a meta problem of how we effectively mass collaborate, and academia is currently failing to do this.