There’s nothing special about taking responsibility for something big or small. It’s the same meaning.
Within teams I’ve worked in it has meant:
You can be confident that someone is personally optimizing to achieve the goal
Both the shame of failing and the glory of succeeding will primarily accrue to them
There is a single point of contact for checking in about any aspect of the problem.
For instance, if you have an issue with how a problem is being solved, there is a single person you can go to to complain
Or if you want to make sure that something you’re doing does not obstruct this other problem from being solved, you can go to them and ask their opinion.
And more things.
I think this applies straightforwardly beyond single organizations.
Various public utilities like water and electricity have government departments who are attempting to actually take responsibility for the problem of everyone having reliable and cheap access to these products. These are the people responsible when the national grid goes out in the UK, which is different from countries with no such government department.
NASA was broadly working on space rockets, but now Elon Musk has stepped forward to make sure our civilization actually becomes multi-planetary in this century. If I was considering some course of action (e.g. taxing imports from India) but wanted to know if it could somehow prevent us from becoming multi planetary, he is basically the top person on my list of people to go to to ask whether it would prevent him from succeeding. (Other people and organizations are also trying to take responsibility for this problem as well and get nonzero credit allocation. In general it’s great if there’s a problem domain where multiple people can attempt to take responsibility for the problem being solved.)
I think there are quite a lot of people trying to take responsibility for improving the public discourse, or preventing it from deteriorating in certain ways, e.g. defending attacks on freedom of speech from particular attack vectors. I think Sam Harris thinks of part of his career as defending the freedom to openly criticize religions like Islam and Christianity, and if I felt like I was concerned that such freedoms would be lost, he’d be one of the first people I’d want to turn to read or reach out to to ask how to help and what the attack vectors are.
You can apply this to particular extinction threats (e.g. asteroids, pandemics, AGI, etc) or to the overall class of such threats. (For instance I’ve historically thought of MIRI as focused on AI and the FHI as interested in the whole class.)
Extinction-level threats seem like a perfectly natural kind of problem someone could try to take responsibility for, thinking about how the entire civilization would respond to a particular attack vector, asking what that person could do in order to prevent extinction (or similar) in that situation, and then implementing such an improvement.
There’s nothing special about taking responsibility for something big or small. It’s the same meaning.
Within teams I’ve worked in it has meant:
You can be confident that someone is personally optimizing to achieve the goal
Both the shame of failing and the glory of succeeding will primarily accrue to them
There is a single point of contact for checking in about any aspect of the problem.
For instance, if you have an issue with how a problem is being solved, there is a single person you can go to to complain
Or if you want to make sure that something you’re doing does not obstruct this other problem from being solved, you can go to them and ask their opinion.
And more things.
I think this applies straightforwardly beyond single organizations.
Various public utilities like water and electricity have government departments who are attempting to actually take responsibility for the problem of everyone having reliable and cheap access to these products. These are the people responsible when the national grid goes out in the UK, which is different from countries with no such government department.
NASA was broadly working on space rockets, but now Elon Musk has stepped forward to make sure our civilization actually becomes multi-planetary in this century. If I was considering some course of action (e.g. taxing imports from India) but wanted to know if it could somehow prevent us from becoming multi planetary, he is basically the top person on my list of people to go to to ask whether it would prevent him from succeeding. (Other people and organizations are also trying to take responsibility for this problem as well and get nonzero credit allocation. In general it’s great if there’s a problem domain where multiple people can attempt to take responsibility for the problem being solved.)
I think there are quite a lot of people trying to take responsibility for improving the public discourse, or preventing it from deteriorating in certain ways, e.g. defending attacks on freedom of speech from particular attack vectors. I think Sam Harris thinks of part of his career as defending the freedom to openly criticize religions like Islam and Christianity, and if I felt like I was concerned that such freedoms would be lost, he’d be one of the first people I’d want to turn to read or reach out to to ask how to help and what the attack vectors are.
You can apply this to particular extinction threats (e.g. asteroids, pandemics, AGI, etc) or to the overall class of such threats. (For instance I’ve historically thought of MIRI as focused on AI and the FHI as interested in the whole class.)
Extinction-level threats seem like a perfectly natural kind of problem someone could try to take responsibility for, thinking about how the entire civilization would respond to a particular attack vector, asking what that person could do in order to prevent extinction (or similar) in that situation, and then implementing such an improvement.