Aside from yourself, the other CHAI grad students don’t seem to have written up their perspectives of what needs to be done about AI risk. Are they content to just each work on their own version of the problem?
I think this is actually pretty strategically reasonable.
CHAI students would have high returns to their probability of attaining a top professorship by writing papers, which is quite beneficial for later recruiting top talent to work on AI safety, and quite structurally beneficial for the establishment of AI safety as a field of research. The time they might spend writing up their research strategy does not help with their this, nor with recruiting help with their line of work (because other nearby researchers face similar pressures, and because academia is not structured to have PhD students lead large teams).
Moreover, if they are pursuing academic success, they face strong incentives to work on particular problems, and so their research strategies may be somewhat distorted by these incentives, decreasing the quality of a research agenda written in that context.
When I look at CHAI research students, I see some pursuing IRL, some pursuing game theory, some pursuing the research areas of their supervisors (all of which could lead to professorships), and some pursuing projects of other research leaders like MIRI or Paul. This seems healthy to me.
I think this is actually pretty strategically reasonable.
CHAI students would have high returns to their probability of attaining a top professorship by writing papers, which is quite beneficial for later recruiting top talent to work on AI safety, and quite structurally beneficial for the establishment of AI safety as a field of research. The time they might spend writing up their research strategy does not help with their this, nor with recruiting help with their line of work (because other nearby researchers face similar pressures, and because academia is not structured to have PhD students lead large teams).
Moreover, if they are pursuing academic success, they face strong incentives to work on particular problems, and so their research strategies may be somewhat distorted by these incentives, decreasing the quality of a research agenda written in that context.
When I look at CHAI research students, I see some pursuing IRL, some pursuing game theory, some pursuing the research areas of their supervisors (all of which could lead to professorships), and some pursuing projects of other research leaders like MIRI or Paul. This seems healthy to me.