Why not do something like the Clay Prize for Mathematics? Offer gargantuan sums for progress on particular subproblems like corrigibility, or inner alignment, or coming up with new reasons why it’s even harder than it already looks, or new frameworks for attacking the problem.
Let MIRI be the judge, and make it so that even the most trivial progress gets a fat cheque. (A few thousand for pointing out typos in MIRI papers seems fair)
It should be obviously easy money even to clever undergraduate compscis.
That should inspire vast numbers of people to do the research instead of their day jobs, which would obviously be great news.
That will likely lead to companies banning their staff from thinking about the problem, which is the best possible publicity. Nothing gets one of us thinking like being told to not think about something.
It might even produce some progress (even better!!).
But what it will likely really do is convince everyone that alignment is the same sort of problem as P=NP, or the Riemann Hypothesis.
Why not do something like the Clay Prize for Mathematics? Offer gargantuan sums for progress on particular subproblems like corrigibility, or inner alignment, or coming up with new reasons why it’s even harder than it already looks, or new frameworks for attacking the problem.
Let MIRI be the judge, and make it so that even the most trivial progress gets a fat cheque. (A few thousand for pointing out typos in MIRI papers seems fair)
It should be obviously easy money even to clever undergraduate compscis.
That should inspire vast numbers of people to do the research instead of their day jobs, which would obviously be great news.
That will likely lead to companies banning their staff from thinking about the problem, which is the best possible publicity. Nothing gets one of us thinking like being told to not think about something.
It might even produce some progress (even better!!).
But what it will likely really do is convince everyone that alignment is the same sort of problem as P=NP, or the Riemann Hypothesis.