Communications in Hard Mode (My new job at MIRI)
Six months ago, I was a high school English teacher.
I wasn’t looking to change careers, even after nineteen sometimes-difficult years. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. After long experimentation, I had found ways to cut through the nonsense and provide real value to my students. Daily, I met my nemesis, Apathy, in glorious battle, and bested her with growing frequency. I had found my voice.
At MIRI, I’m still struggling to find my voice, for reasons my colleagues have invited me to share later in this post. But my nemesis is the same.
Apathy will be the death of us. Indifference about whether this whole AI thing goes well or ends in disaster. Come-what-may acceptance of whatever awaits us at the other end of the glittering path. Telling ourselves that there’s nothing we can do anyway. Imagining that some adults in the room will take care of the problem, even if we don’t see any such adults.
Perhaps you’ve felt her insidious pull on your psyche. I think we all have. This AI stuff is cool. Giving in to the “thermodynamic god”, to She-Who-Can’t-Be-Bothered, would be so much easier than the alternative, and probably a lot more fun (while it lasted).
And me? I was an English teacher. What could I do?
A little! I could donate and volunteer, as I did in modest fashion to MIRI’s predecessor organization for a while even before taking my first teaching contract. I could make sure my students and coworkers knew at least one person who was openly alarmed about AI. And I could find easy dignity in being ready to answer a call from MIRI that would realistically never come.
You can guess the rest. The universe called my bluff. I scrambled to make it not a bluff. And here I am on MIRI’s growing comms team!
It was a near thing, though. When MIRI posted about the open position, I almost looked away.
I think about that a lot now, especially on the hard days: guessing at the amount of history that was made by people who almost stayed in bed, and about how much history almost happened but for a last-minute “Nah.”
We stand on the shoulders of giants who didn’t have to be. If we are to honor their legacy, we have to be the adults we want to see in the room. That sounds like work because it is. The adversary draws strength from this, for Apathy is Lazy’s child.
Apathy does not ‘adult’. She wears the fashions and plays the status games, but she doesn’t do the math. She doesn’t change her mind, or check her sources. She doesn’t reach across the aisle. When asked to choose between speaking up and saving face, she picks ‘face’ every time.
I don’t think the world would be racing off the AI cliff if there were more adults and less apathy. There really aren’t that many players pushing the frontier, and most bystanders don’t like what they see when they find the motivation to look. Don’t build things smarter than us until we’re ready. What’s so hard about that? As your former English teacher in spirit, I’m obligated to quote Atticus Finch here: “This case is not a difficult one, it requires no minute sifting of complicated facts, but it does require you to be sure beyond reasonable doubt...”
My star students will reflect that Atticus lost that case, thanks to jurors who picked ‘save face’ over ‘speak up’. But it was a near thing! They almost bent the “long moral arc” towards justice before they said, “Nah.”
Unfortunately, we get no points for almost. We don’t survive the arrival of AIs that outclass humanity by almost doing the grown-up thing, by almost not sleepwalking through the threshold before the metaphorical spinning blades have been disabled.
MIRI does communications in hard mode because the universe is set to hard mode. We need our words to be understood to mean what they say. Hard mode is hard! Being adults in this line of work cuts against a lot of human instinct and runs counter to common norms around PR and outreach. Some strictures this entails:
We don’t mince words. We speak up, even if this must sometimes come at the expense of respectability. We want to come across exactly as alarmed as the situation warrants (and no more). We avoid euphemisms and needlessly academic stylings.
We don’t say things we don’t believe are true. We don’t just repeat things we’ve heard. We don’t invent explanations for things we don’t understand. We avoid unhelpful speculation, and label our conjectures as such. We express our uncertainty.
We don’t employ sophistry. We don’t knowingly use flawed or weak arguments, and we scrutinize our work to root them out.
We don’t use haggling tactics. We call for what we think is needed — no more, no less. If we say we need an international halt to the development of advanced general AI systems, and that it might need to last decades, it’s because we don’t think anything less will do — not because we hope a slate of compromise regulations will suffice, or because we think a halt is a stepping stone to the policy we actually want.
We don’t play 4-D chess. We don’t conceal our true intentions. We take actions because we think the primary reactions will be helpful. This doesn’t mean we don’t think about nth order consequences — I’m in awe of how hard MIRI thinks about these! — but we don’t employ strategies where success depends on reactions to reactions to reactions (etc.) going as planned.
We don’t chase applause. Useful action, not approval, is the unit of progress. Crowd-pleasing language interferes with critical thinking and signals that a piece is seeking praise rather than action.
We leave our tribal politics at home. This doesn’t just mean avoiding pot-shots on our outgroups; it means avoiding any appearance of wanting to do so — and even the “mind-killing” distraction of phrasing that might evoke partisan thoughts.
We can’t claim to get it right every time, but boy do we try. That’s the best explanation I can offer as to why you may find the volume of our public output disappointing these last six months. (I know I do!) Respectability may be overrated, but credibility is not, and we really don’t want to blow it.
I’ve found walking this line even more challenging than it sounds. As someone with rationalist sensibilities but a career in public education, I was long used to being seen as the most careful thinker in the room. But being in an actually careful room is an adjustment, especially for someone who really wants our work to be read, and therefore tries to make it engaging. I haven’t been shut down on this push — we’re trying to broaden our reach, after all — but the whole team is struggling to apply our very high standards to writing for audiences unready or unwilling to work through dense passages with precise terminology.
Part of the puzzle is that such readers aren’t used to writers playing by our rules, and may not recognize that we are doing so. When we write approachably and engagingly, we fear readers concluding that we must be trying to charm them or sell them something; this would cause them to apply adjustment factors for marketing-speak, and to read between the lines for hidden motives that aren’t there.
I’ve found it helpful to recognize that we’re barely in the persuasion business at all. We’re showing you the facts as we understand them, and think our suggested course of action will be as logical to you as it is to us. Water flows downhill. Enriched uranium in a sufficiently large pile will go critical. Powerful AIs built with existing methods will pursue goals incompatible with our survival.
Admittedly, working out the details of enforceable global agreements to prevent AI catastrophe are going to be more complicated than the logic behind them. Laying some of the groundwork for this effort is one objective of our new Technical Governance Team.
Helping more readers understand why smarter-than-human AI is lethal on the current path is also going to be more complicated. That task falls to us in comms, in collaboration with our senior team. We’re working on it. (We’ve got a few medium-to-large writing projects that we’ve been working on this year, with commensurate care; if any of them turn out to be effective then they will retroactively be braggable 2024 accomplishments.)
But yes, our bar is so high we struggle to get over it. We aren’t shipping enough yet. We’re building capacity and working through some growing pains associated with our pivot to comms. We’re learning, though, and we want to be learning faster. To this end, you should expect more experimentation from us in 2025.
This post is an early taste of that. Establishing more personal voices for MIRI comms will let us try more approaches while owning our inevitable errors as individuals. Seems worth a try.
So… Hi! I’m Mitch. I almost decided not to try.
If you’re maybe just-this-side-of-almost, I invite you to try, too. It doesn’t have to be your career, or a donation (though MIRI and its fellow travelers welcome both). But please, strike a blow against Apathy! One place to start: Stare at the AI problem for a while, if you haven’t already, and then take the slightly awkward, slightly emotional, slightly effortful step of telling your friends and colleagues what you see.
Don’t feel bad about depriving Her Royal Numbness of one of her subjects. She’ll be fine. More to the point, she won’t care.
That’s why we can win. We just have to want it more than she does.
Shouldn’t be too hard.
Mod note: I frontpaged this. It was a bit of an edge case because we normally don’t frontpage “organizational announcements”, but, I felt like this one had enough implicit models that I’d feel good reading it in a couple years, whether or not MIRI is no longer doing this particular strategy.
I’d love to hear some more specific advice about how to communicate in these kinds of circumstances when it’s much easier for folk not to listen.
Me too! I put the AI problem in the broader class of topics where apathy serves as a dual defense mechanism — not just against needing to expend effort and resources, but against emotional discomfort. You can see the same dual barrier when promoting charitable causes aimed at reducing human misery, or when teaching a subject to students who have really struggled with it in the past.
As a teacher, I attacked both of those roots more deliberately as I grew, trying hard to not make my class feel like work most days while building an atmosphere of low-stakes experimentation where failure could be fun rather than painful. (An example of what success looked like: students taking the risk of trying the more advanced writing approaches I modeled instead of endlessly rewriting the same basic meta essay they had learned in middle school.)
One tactic for eroding defensive apathy is therapeutic empathy. You see this both in many good teachers and (I imagine) relationship counselors. It’s much harder in writing, though I suppose I did a little bit of that in this post when I talked about how the reader and I have probably both felt the pull of Apathy with regards to the AI problem. I think empathy works partly because it builds a human connection, and partly because it brings the feared pain to the surface, where we find (with the help of that human connection) that it can be endured, freeing us to work on the problem that accompanies it.
Whether and how to use authentic human connections in our communications is a topic of ongoing research and debate at MIRI. It has obvious problems with regards to scientific respectability, as there’s this sense in intellectual culture that it’s impossible to be impartial about anything one has feelings about.
And sure, the science itself should be dispassionate. The universe doesn’t care how we feel about it, and our emotions will try to keep us from learning things we don’t want to be true.
But when communicating our findings? To the extent that our task is two-pronged: (1) communicating the truth as we understand it and (2) eliciting a global response to address it, I suspect we will need some human warmth and connection in the second prong even as we continue to avoid it in the first. Apathy loves the cold.
Beautiful. Thank you for applying your considerable skills to this task.
A few thoughts on directions:
I very much agree with the strategy of moving slowly to conserve credibility.
The policy of stating what you mean is also very good for credibility. It is foreign to most public discourse, in which speaking to persuade rather than inform is the norm. I hope that a statement like
“we come from an intellectual tradition in which speaking to inform rather than persuade is the norm. Exaggerating one’s claims might help in the short term, but it will cost credibility and confuse everyone in the longer term. So we try to say just what we believe, and try to point to our reasons for believing it so that everyone can judge for themselves.”
I’m not sure how useful that would be, but my perception is that many people have some affinity for truth and rationality, so making that foundational claim and then trying to follow it may be appealing and be taken seriously by enough people to matter.
Working within that aspirational goal, I think it’s important to practice epistemic modesty.
From what I’ve seen of the public discourse, overstating one’s certainty of the dangers of AGI and the difficulty of alignment is a substantial drain on the credibility of the movement.
It is both more reasonable and more effective to say “alignment might be very difficult, so we should have a very sound safety case before actually building agentic systems smarter than humans” rather than exaggerating our collective knowledge by saying “if we build it we all die”. Saying that and exaggerating our certainty opens up a line of distracting counterattack in which the “doomers” are mocked for either foolishly overestimating their knowledge, or overstating their case as a deliberate deception.
It should be quite adequate and vastly more credible to say “if we build it without knowing, humanity may well not survive for long. And the people building it will not stop in time to know if it’s safe, if we do not demand they proceed safely. Move fast and break things is an exciting motto, but it isn’t a reasonable way to approach the next stage of evolution.”
And that does not exceed our true collective epistemic uncertainty. I have my own informed and developed opinion about the likely difficulty of alignment. But looking at the range of expert opinions, I feel it is most fair and modest to say we do not yet know.
Proceeding toward potential doom without knowing the risks is a catastrophic error born from excitement (from the optimistic) and apathy (from the cautious).
(I work at MIRI but views are my own)
I don’t think ‘if we build it we all die’ requires that alignment be hard [edit: although it is incompatible with alignment by default]. It just requires that our default trajectory involves building ASI before solving alignment (and, looking at our present-day resource allocation, this seems very likely to be the world we are in, conditional on building ASI at all).
[I want to note that I’m being very intentional when I say “ASI” and “solving alignment” and not “AGI” and “improving the safety situation”]
ASI alignment could be trivial (happens by default), easy, or hard. If it is trivial, then “if we build it, we all die” is false.
Separately, I don’t buy that misaligned ASI with totally alien goals and that full takes over will certainly kill everyone due to[1] trade arguments like this one. I also think it’s plausilbe that such an AI will be at least very slightly kind such that it is willing to spend a tiny amount of resources keeping humans alive if this is cheap. Thus, “the situation is well described as ‘we all die’ conditional on misaligned ASI with almost totally alien goals and that full takes over” seems more like 25-50% likely to me (and in some of these scenarios, not literally everyone dies, maybe a tiny fraction of humans survive but have negligable astronomical autonomy and control).
This presupposes that we’re in base reality rather than in a simulation designed for some purpose relating to human civilization. The situation differs substantially in the simulation case.
Good point—what I said isn’t true in the case of alignment by default.
Edited my initial comment to reflect this
It’s not true if alignment is easy, too, right? My timelines are short, but we do still have a little time to do alignment work. And the orgs are going to do a little alignment work. I wonder if there’s an assumption here that OpenAI and co don’t even believe that alignment is a concern? I don’t think that’s true, although I do think they probably dramatically underrate x-risk dangers based on incentive-driven biases, but they do seem to appreciate the basic arguments.
And I expect them to get a whole lot more serious about it once they’re staring a capable agent in the face. It’s one thing to dismiss the dangers of tigers from a distance, another when there’s just a fence between you and it. I think proximity is going to sharpen everyone’s thinking a good bit by inspiring them to spend more time thinking about the dangers.
Your version of events requires a change of heart (for ‘them to get a whole lot more serious’). I’m just looking at the default outcome. Whether alignment is hard or easy (although not if it’s totally trivial), it appears to be progressing substantially more slowly than capabilities (and the parts of it that are advancing are the most capabilities-synergizing, so it’s unclear what the oft-lauded ‘differential advancement of safety’ really looks like).
I consider at least a modest change of heart to be the default.
And I think it’s really hard to say how fast alignment is progressing relative to capabilities. If by “alignment” you mean formal proofs of safety then definitely we’re not on track. But there’s a real chance that we don’t need those. We are training networks to follow instructions, and it’s possible that weak type of tool “alignment” can be leveraged into true agent alignment for instruction-following or corrigibility. If so, we have solved AGI alignment. That would give us superhuman help solving ASI alignment, and the “societal alignment” problem of surviving intent-aligned AGIs with different masters.
This seems like the default for how we’ll try to align AGI. We don’t know if it will work.
When I get MIRI-style thinkers to fully engage with this set of ideas, they tend to say “hm maybe”. But I haven’t gotten enough engagement to have any confidence. Prosaic alignment, LLM thinkers usually aren’t engaging with the hard problems of alignment that crop up when we hit fully autonomous AGI entities, like strong optimization’s effects on goal misgeneralization, reflection and learning-based alignment shifts. And almost nobody is thinking that far ahead in societal coordination dynamics.
So I’d really like to see agent foundations and prosaic alignment thinking converge on the types of LLM-based AGI agents we seem likely to get in the near future. We just really don’t know if we can align them or not, because we just really haven’t thought about it deeply yet.
Links to all of those ideas in depth can be found in a couple link hops from my recent, brief Intent alignment as a stepping-stone to value alignment.
The people actually building AGI very publicly disagree that we are not on track to solve alignment before building AGI. So do many genuine experts. For instance, I strongly disagree with Pope and Belrose’s “AI is easy to control” but it’s sitting right there in public, and it’s hard to claim they’re not actually experts.
And I just don’t see why you’d want to fight that battle.
I’d say it’s probably pointless to use the higher probability; an estimated 50% chance of everyone dying on the current trajectory seems like plenty to alarm people. That’s vaguely what we’d get if we said “some experts think 99%, others think 1%, so we collectively just don’t know”.
Stating MIRI’s collective opinion instead of a reasonable statement of the consensus is unnecessary and costs you credibility.
To put it another way: someone who uses their own estimate instead of stating the range of credible estimates is less trustworthy on average to speak for a broad population. They’re demonstrating a blinkered, insular style of thinking. The public wants a broad view guiding public policy.
And in this case I just don’t see why you’d take that credibility hit.
Edit: having thought about it a little more, I do actually think that some people would accept a 50% chance of survival and say “roll the dice!”. That’s largely based on the wildly exaggerated fears of civilizational collapse from global warming. And I think that, if they expressed those beliefs clearly, the majority of humanity would still say “wait what that’s insane, we have to make progress on alignment before launching AGI”.
I do mean ASI, not AGI. I know Pope + Belrose also mean to include ASI in their analysis, but it’s still helpful to me if we just use ASI here, so I’m not constantly wondering if you’ve switched to thinking about AGI.
Obligatory ‘no really, I am not speaking for MIRI here.’
My impression is that MIRI is not trying to speak for anyone else. Representing the complete scientific consensus is an undue burden to place on an org that has not made that claim about itself. MIRI represents MIRI, and is one component voice of the ‘broad view guiding public policy’, not its totality. No one person or org is in the chair with the lever; we’re all just shouting what we think in directions we expect the diffuse network of decision-makers to be sitting in, with more or less success. It’s true that ‘claiming to represent the consensus’ is a tacking one can take to appear authoritative, and not (always) a dishonest move. To my knowledge, this is not MIRI’s strategy. This is the strategy of, ie, the CAIS letter (although not of CAIS as a whole!), and occasionally AIS orgs cite expert consensus or specific, otherwise-disagreeing experts as having directional agreement with the org (for an extreme case, see Yann LeCun shortening his timelines). This is not the same as attempting to draw authority from the impression that one’s entire aim is simply ‘sharing consensus.’
And then my model of Seth says ‘Well we should have an org whose entire strategy is gathering and sharing expert consensus, and I’m disappointed that this isn’t MIRI, because this is a better strategy,’ or else cites a bunch of recent instances of MIRI claiming to represent scientific consensus (afaik these don’t exist, but it would be nice to know if they do). It is fair for you to think MIRI should be doing a different thing. Imo MIRI’s history points away from it being a good fit to take representing scientific consensus as its primary charge (and this is, afaict, part of why AI Impacts was a separate project).
I think MIRI comms are by and large well sign-posted to indicate ‘MIRI thinks x’ or ‘Mitch thinks y’ or ‘Bengio said z.’ If you think a single org should build influence and advocate for a consensus view then help found one, or encourage someone else to do so. This just isn’t what MIRI is doing.
I thought the point of this post was that MIRI is still developing its comms strategy, and one criteria is preserving credibility. I really hope they’ll do that. It’s not violating rationalist principles to talk about beliefs beyond your own.
You’re half right about what I think. I want to live, so I want MIRI to do a good job of comms. Lots of people are shouting their own opinion. I assumed MIRI wanted to be effective, not just shout along with the chorus.
MIRI wouldn’t have to do a bit of extra work to do what I’m suggesting. They’d just have to note their existing knowledge of the (lack of) expert consensus, instead of just giving their own opinion.
You haven’t really disagreed that that would be more effective.
To put it this way: people (largely correctly) believe that MIRI’s beliefs are a product of one guy, EY. Citing more than one guy’s opinions is way more credible, no matter how expert that guy—and it avoids arguing about who’s more expert.
Oh, I feel fine about saying ‘draft artifacts currently under production by the comms team ever cite someone who is not Eliezer, including experts with a lower p(doom)’ which, based on this comment, is what I take to be the goalpost. This is just regular coalition signaling though and not positioning yourself as, terminally, a neutral observer of consensus.
“You haven’t really disagreed that [claiming to speak for scientific consensus] would be more effective.”
That’s right! I’m really not sure about this. My experience has been that ~every take someone offers to normies in policy is preceded by ‘the science says…’, so maybe the market is kind of saturated here. I’d also worry that precommitting to only argue in line with the consensus might bind you to act against your beliefs (and I think EY et al have valuable inside-view takes that shouldn’t be stymied by the trends of an increasingly-confused and poisonous discourse). That something is a local credibility win (I’m not sure if it is, actually) doesn’t mean it’s got the best nth order effects among all options long-term (including on the dimension of credibility).
I believe that Seth would find messaging that did this more credible. I think ‘we’re really not sure’ is a bad strategy if you really are sure, which MIRI leadership, famously, is.
MIRI leadership is famously very wrong about how sure they think they are. That’s my concern. It’s obvious to any rationalist that it’s not rational to believe >99% in something that’s highly theoretical. It’s almost certainly epistemic hubris if not outright foolishness.
I have immense respect for EYs intellect. He seems to be the smartest human I’ve engaged with enough to judge their intellect. On this point he is either obviously or seemingly wrong. I have personally spent at least a hundred hours following his specific logic, (and lots more on the background knowledge it’s based on), and I’m personally quite sure he’s overestimating his certainty. His discussions with other experts always end up falling back on differing intuitions.He got there first, but a bunch of us have now put real time into following and extending his logic.
I have a whole theory on how he wound up so wrong, involving massive frustration and underappreciating how biased people are to short-term thinking and motivated reasoning, but that’s beside the point.
Whether he’s right doesn’t really matter; what matters is that >99.9% doom sounds crazy, and it’s really complex to argue it even could be right, let alone that it actually is.
Since it sounds crazy, leaning on that point is the very best way to harm MIRIs credibility. And because they are one of the most publicly visible advocates of AGI x-risk caution (and planning to become even higher profile it seems), it may make the whole thing sound less credible—maybe by a lot.
Please, please don’t do it or encourage others to do it.
I’m actually starting to worry that MIRI could make us worse off if they insist on shouting loudly and leaning on our least credible point. Public discourse isn’t rational, so focusing on the worst point could make the vibes-based public discussion go against what is otherwise a very simple and sane viewpoint: don’t make a smarter species unless you’re pretty sure it won’t turn on you.
Hopefully I needn’t worry, because MIRI has engaged communication experts, and they will resist just adopting EYs unreasonable doom estimate and bad comms strategy.
To your specific point: “we’re really not sure” is not a bad strategy if “we” means humanity as a whole (if by bad you mean dishonest).
If by bad you mean ineffective: do you seriously think people wouldn’t object to the push for AGI if they thought we were totally unsure?
“One guy who’s thought about this for a long time and some other people he recruited think it’s definitely going to fail” really seems like a way worse argument than “expert opinion is utterly split, so any fool can see we collectively are completely unsure it’s safe”.
By bad I mean dishonest, and by ‘we’ I mean the speaker (in this case, MIRI).
I take myself to have two central claims across this thread:
Your initial comment was straw manning the ‘if we build [ASI], we all die’ position.
MIRI is likely not a natural fit to consign itself to service as the neutral mouthpiece of scientific consensus.
I do not see where your most recent comment has any surface area with either of these claims.
I do want to offer some reassurance, though:
I do not take “One guy who’s thought about this for a long time and some other people he recruited think it’s definitely going to fail” to be descriptive of the MIRI comms strategy.
I think we’re talking past each other, so we’d better park it and come back to the topic later and more carefully.
I do feel like you’re misrepresenting my position, so I am going to respond and then quit there. You’re welcome to respond; I’ll try to resist carrying on, and move on to more productive things. I apologize for my somewhat argumentative tone. These are things I feel strongly about, since I think MIRIs communication might matter quite a lot, but that’s not a good reason to get argumentative.
Strawmanning: I’m afraid you’r right that I’m probably exaggerating MIRI’s claims. I don’t think it’s quite a strawman; “if we build it we all die” is very much the tone I get from MIRI comms on LW and X (mostly EY), but I do note that I haven’t seen him use 99.9%+ in some time, so maybe he’s already doing some of what I suggest. And I haven’t surveyed all of MIRIs official comms. But what we’re discussing is a change in comms strategy.
I have gotten more strident in repeated attempts to make my central point clearer. That’s my fault; you weren’t addressing my actual concern so I kept trying to highlight it. I still am not sure if you’re understanding my main point, but that’s fine; I can try to say it better in future iterations.
This is the first place I can see you suggesting that I’m exaggerating MIRIs tone, so if it’s your central concern that’s weird. But again, it’s a valid complaint; I won’t make that characterization in more public places, lest it hurt MIRI’s credibility.
MIRI claiming to accurately represent scientific consensus was never my suggestion, I don’t know where you got that. I clarified that I expect zero additional effort or strong claims, just “different experts believe a lot of different things”.
Honesty: I tried to specify from the first that I’m not suggesting dishonesty by any normal standard. Accurately reporting a (vague) range of others’ opinions is just as honest as reporting your own opinion. Not saying the least convincing part the loudest might be dishonesty by radical honesty standards, but I thought rationalists had more or less agreed that those aren’t a reasonable target. That standard of honesty would kind of conflict with having a “comms strategy” at all.
Thanks for this post.
I’d love to have a regular (weekly/monthly/quarterly) post that’s just “here’s what we’re focusing on at MIRI these days”.
I respect and value MIRI’s leadership on the complex topic of building understanding and coordination around AI.
I spend a lot of time doing AI social media, and I try to promote the best recommendations I know to others. Whatever thoughts MIRI has would be helpful.
Given that I think about this less often and less capably than you folks do, it seems like there’s a low hanging fruit opportunity for people like me to stay more in sync with MIRI. My show (Doom Debates) isn’t affiliated with MIRI, but as long as there keeps being no particular disagreement that I have with MIRI, I’d like to make sure I’m pulling in the same direction as you all.
MIRI has its monthly newsletters, though I can tell that’s not quite what you want. I predict (medium confidence) that we will be upping our level of active coordination with allied orgs and individuals on upcoming projects once we ship some of our current ones. I believe you already have channels to people at MIRI, but feel free to DM me if you want to chat.
Tangentially to Tanagrabeast’s “least you can do” suggestion, as a case report: I came out to my family as an AI xrisk worrier over a decade ago, when one could still do so in a fairly lighthearted way. They didn’t immediately start donating to MIRI and calling their senators to request an AI safety manhattan project, but they did agree with the arguments I presented, and check up with me, on occasion, about how the timelines and probabilities are looking.
I have had two new employers since then, and a few groups of friends; and with each, when the conversation turns to AI (as it often does, over the last half-decade), I mention my belief that it’s likely going to kill us all, and expand on Instrumental Convergence, RAAP, and/or “x-risk, from Erewhon, to IJ Good, to the Extropians,” depending on which aspect people seem interested in. I’ve been surprised by the utter lack of dismissal and mockery, so far!
Hi Mitch :)
I’m also trying to promote AI safety and would really like your advice.
Your post is inspiring and makes me smile! I’ve had my own struggles with Apathy and staying in bed.
I want your advice, because I’m trying to write a better version of the Statement on AI Risk.
I feel the version I wrote has good ideas and logic, but poor English. I didn’t get good grades in English class :/
My idea is currently getting ignored by everyone. I’m sending cold emails to the FLI (Future of Life Institute) and CAIS (Center for AI Safety) but it’s not working. I have no idea how you’re supposed to communicate with organizations.
I also don’t know why people don’t like my idea, because nobody tells me. No one’s there to grade the essay!
Can you show me what I’m doing wrong? This way I might do better, or I might realize I should work on other things instead (which saves me time/effort).
Thanks!
PS: I donated $500 to MIRI, because why not, money won’t do me much good after the singularity haha :)
Glad you got something out of the post! I recognize and appreciate your generous action, and will DM you with regards to your request.