What is the AI Safety Camp?
Would you like to work on AI safety or strategy research and are looking for a concrete way to get started? We are organizing this camp for aspiring AI safety and strategy researchers. At the camp, you:
- build connections with others in the field
- build your research portfolio
- receive feedback on your research ideas and help others with theirs
- make concrete progress on open AI safety research questions
Read more about the last research camp here, including a summary of the produced research.
What’s the structure of the camp?
The camp is preceded by 7 weeks of preparation in form of an online study group of 3-5 people, followed by a 10-day intensive camp with the aim of creating and publishing a research paper, extensive blog post, or github repository.
What will attendants work on?
Participants will work in groups on tightly-defined research projects, for example in the following areas:
- Strategy and Policy
- Agent Foundations (decision theory, subsystem alignment, embedded world models, MIRI-style)
- Value learning (IRL, approval-directed agents, wireheading, …)
- Corrigibility / Interruptibility
- Side Effects, Safe Exploration
- Scalable & Informed Oversight
- Robustness (distributional shift, adversarial examples)
- Human Values (including philosophical and psychological approaches)
When and where?
4–14 October 2018, in Prague, Czech Republic.
Pricing
Attendance is free.
Apply
Applications and more information on aisafetycamp.com
But this is not about whether academia is on the same page or not; it's about the importance of pushing the results via academic channels because otherwise they won't be recognized by anyone (policy makers especially). Moreover, what I mention above are funding institutions offering the finances of individual projects - assessed in terms of their significance and feasibility. If there is a decent methodology to address the given objectives, even if the issue is controversial, this doesn't mean the project won't be financed. Alternatively, if you actually know of decent project applications that have been rejected, well let's see those and examine whether there is indeed a bias in the field. Finally, why do you think that academia is averse towards risky projects?! Take for instance ERC schemes: they are intentionally designed for high-risk/high-gain project proposals, that are transformative and groundbreaking in character.
There is an analogy with speculative investing here I think - for something to be widely regarded as worthwhile investing in (i.e. research funded by mainstream academia) it has to already have evidence of success (e.g. Bitcoin now). By which point it is no longer new and highly promising in terms of expected value (like Bitcoin was in, say, 2011) i.e. it is necesssarily the case that all things very high in (relative) expected value are outside the mainstream.
AGI alignment is gaining more credibility, but it still doesn't seem like it's that accepted in ... (read more)