The only real answers at this point seem like mass public advocacy
If AI timelines are short, then I wouldn’t focus on public advocacy, but the decision-makers. Public opinion changes slowly and succeeding may even interfere with the ability of experts to make decisions.
I would also suggest that someone should focus on within-EA advocacy too (whilst being open about any possible limitations or uncertainties in their understanding).
To clarify, by “public advocacy” I should’ve said “within-expert advocacy, i.e. AI researchers (not just at AGI-capable organizations)”. I’ll fix that.
Along these lines, I’ve been thinking maybe the best chance we have will be finding ways to directly support the major AI labs most likely to create advanced AI, to help guide their decisions toward better outcomes.
Like perhaps some well-chosen representatives from the EA AI safety community could be doing free, regular consulting with DeepMind and OpenAI, etc. about safety. Find some way to be a resource they consider useful but also help them keep safety top-of-mind. If free isn’t good enough, with the current state of funding in EA, we could even pay the companies just to meet regularly with the AI safety consultants.
If this was realized, of course the consultants would have to sign NDAs and so what’s going on couldn’t be openly discussed on forums like LessWrong. (I suppose this kind of arrangement may already be happening and we just aren’t aware of it because of this.)
Update: Chris’s suggestion in the reply to this comment just for EA funders to offer the labs money to hire more safety researchers seems simpler and more workable than the above consultant model.
This is a rough idea—a lot more thought needs to go into exactly what to do and how to do it. But something like this could be extremely impactful. A handful of people at one of these AI companies could well be soon determining the fate of humanity with their engineering decisions. If we could positively influence them in some way, that may be our best hope.
Yeah, I wonder if we could offer these companies funding to take on more AI Safety researchers? Even if they’re well-resourced, management probably wants to look financially responsible.
DeepMind and OpenAI both already employee teams of existential-risk focused AI safety researchers. While I don’t personally work on any of these teams, I get the impression from speaking to them that they are much more talent-constrained than resource-constrained.
I’m not sure how to alleviate this problem in the short term. My best guess would be free bootcamp-style training for value-aligned people who are promising researchers but lack specific relevant skills. For example, ML engineering training or formal mathematics education for junior AIS researchers who would plausibly be competitive hires if that part of their background were strengthened.
However, I don’t think that offering AI safety researchers as “free consultants” to these organizations would have much impact. I doubt the organizations would accept since they already have relevant internal teams, and AI safety researchers can presumably have greater impact working within the organization than as external consultants.
My best guess would be free bootcamp-style training for value-aligned people who are promising researchers but lack specific relevant skills. For example, ML engineering training or formal mathematics education for junior AIS researchers who would plausibly be competitive hires if that part of their background were strengthened.
The low-effort version of this would be, instead of spinning up your own bootcamp, having value-aligned people apply for a grant to the Long-Term Future Fund to participate in a bootcamp.
I’m not completely opposed to public outreach. I think there should be some attempts to address misconceptions (ie. such that it is like Terminator; or at least what people remember/infer about Terminator).
I mean, what would be the actual downsides of a literal mob showing up at DeepMind’s headquarters holding “please align AI” giant banners?
I haven’t really thought that through. It might be worth talking to people and see what they say.
I’m pretty opposed to public outreach to get support for alignment, but the alternative goal of whipping up enough hysteria to destroy the field of AI/the AGI development groups killing us seems much more doable. Reason being from my lifelong experience observing public discourse on topics I have expert knowledge on (e.g. nuclear weapons, China), it seems completely impossible to implant the exact right ideas into the public mind, especially for a complex subject. Once you attract attention to a topic, no matter how much effort you put into presenting the proper arguments, the conversation and people’s beliefs inevitably trend toward simple & meme-y/emotionally riveting ideas, instead of the accurate ones. (Looking at the popular discourse on climate change is another good illustration of this.)
But in this case, maybe even if people latch onto misguided fears about Terminator or whatever, as long as they have some sort of intense fear of AI, it can still produce the intended actions. To be clear I’m still very unsure whether such a campaign is a good idea at this point, just a thought.
I think reaching out to governments is a more direct lever: civilians don’t have the power to shut down AI themselves (unless mobs literally burn down all the AGI offices), the goal with public messaging would be to convince them to pressure the leadership to ban it right? Why not cut out the middleman and make the leaders see the dire danger directly?
Holding please align AI signs in front of DeepMind’s headquarters is an idea. Attempting to persuade “the general public” is a bad idea. “The general public” will react too slowly and without any competence. We need to target people actually doing the burning.
If AI timelines are short, then I wouldn’t focus on public advocacy, but the decision-makers. Public opinion changes slowly and succeeding may even interfere with the ability of experts to make decisions.
I would also suggest that someone should focus on within-EA advocacy too (whilst being open about any possible limitations or uncertainties in their understanding).
To clarify, by “public advocacy” I should’ve said “within-expert advocacy, i.e. AI researchers (not just at AGI-capable organizations)”. I’ll fix that.
Along these lines, I’ve been thinking maybe the best chance we have will be finding ways to directly support the major AI labs most likely to create advanced AI, to help guide their decisions toward better outcomes.
Like perhaps some well-chosen representatives from the EA AI safety community could be doing free, regular consulting with DeepMind and OpenAI, etc. about safety. Find some way to be a resource they consider useful but also help them keep safety top-of-mind. If free isn’t good enough, with the current state of funding in EA, we could even pay the companies just to meet regularly with the AI safety consultants.
If this was realized, of course the consultants would have to sign NDAs and so what’s going on couldn’t be openly discussed on forums like LessWrong. (I suppose this kind of arrangement may already be happening and we just aren’t aware of it because of this.)
Update: Chris’s suggestion in the reply to this comment just for EA funders to offer the labs money to hire more safety researchers seems simpler and more workable than the above consultant model.
This is a rough idea—a lot more thought needs to go into exactly what to do and how to do it. But something like this could be extremely impactful. A handful of people at one of these AI companies could well be soon determining the fate of humanity with their engineering decisions. If we could positively influence them in some way, that may be our best hope.
Yeah, I wonder if we could offer these companies funding to take on more AI Safety researchers? Even if they’re well-resourced, management probably wants to look financially responsible.
DeepMind and OpenAI both already employee teams of existential-risk focused AI safety researchers. While I don’t personally work on any of these teams, I get the impression from speaking to them that they are much more talent-constrained than resource-constrained.
I’m not sure how to alleviate this problem in the short term. My best guess would be free bootcamp-style training for value-aligned people who are promising researchers but lack specific relevant skills. For example, ML engineering training or formal mathematics education for junior AIS researchers who would plausibly be competitive hires if that part of their background were strengthened.
However, I don’t think that offering AI safety researchers as “free consultants” to these organizations would have much impact. I doubt the organizations would accept since they already have relevant internal teams, and AI safety researchers can presumably have greater impact working within the organization than as external consultants.
The low-effort version of this would be, instead of spinning up your own bootcamp, having value-aligned people apply for a grant to the Long-Term Future Fund to participate in a bootcamp.
Well, the mass public advocacy in the strict sense may not change the public opinion in a short time, but I’m still willing to give it a try.
I mean, what would be the actual downsides of a literal mob showing up at DeepMind’s headquarters holding “please align AI” giant banners?
(EDIT: maybe “mob” is not the right word, I’m not advocating for angry mobs burning down the AI labs… “crowd” would have been better).
I’m not completely opposed to public outreach. I think there should be some attempts to address misconceptions (ie. such that it is like Terminator; or at least what people remember/infer about Terminator).
I haven’t really thought that through. It might be worth talking to people and see what they say.
I’m pretty opposed to public outreach to get support for alignment, but the alternative goal of whipping up enough hysteria to destroy the field of AI/the AGI development groups killing us seems much more doable. Reason being from my lifelong experience observing public discourse on topics I have expert knowledge on (e.g. nuclear weapons, China), it seems completely impossible to implant the exact right ideas into the public mind, especially for a complex subject. Once you attract attention to a topic, no matter how much effort you put into presenting the proper arguments, the conversation and people’s beliefs inevitably trend toward simple & meme-y/emotionally riveting ideas, instead of the accurate ones. (Looking at the popular discourse on climate change is another good illustration of this.)
But in this case, maybe even if people latch onto misguided fears about Terminator or whatever, as long as they have some sort of intense fear of AI, it can still produce the intended actions. To be clear I’m still very unsure whether such a campaign is a good idea at this point, just a thought.
I think reaching out to governments is a more direct lever: civilians don’t have the power to shut down AI themselves (unless mobs literally burn down all the AGI offices), the goal with public messaging would be to convince them to pressure the leadership to ban it right? Why not cut out the middleman and make the leaders see the dire danger directly?
Holding please align AI signs in front of DeepMind’s headquarters is an idea. Attempting to persuade “the general public” is a bad idea. “The general public” will react too slowly and without any competence. We need to target people actually doing the burning.