Hello Effective Altruism Forum, I am Nate Soares, and I will be here to answer your questions tomorrow, Thursday the 11th of June, 15:00-18:00 US Pacific time. You can post questions here in the interim.
Last week Monday, I took the reins as executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. MIRI focuses on studying technical problems of long-term AI safety. I'm happy to chat about what that means, why it's important, why we think we can make a difference now, what the open technical problems are, how we approach them, and some of my plans for the future.
I'm also happy to answer questions about my personal history and how I got here, or about personal growth and mindhacking (a subject I touch upon frequently in my blog, Minding Our Way), or about whatever else piques your curiosity. This is an AMA, after all!
EDIT (15:00): All right, I'm here. Dang there are a lot of questions! Let's get this started :-)
EDIT (18:00): Ok, that's a wrap. Thanks, everyone! Those were great questions.
All right, I'll come back for one more question. Thanks, Wei. Tough question. Briefly,
(1) I can't see that many paths to victory. The only ones I can see go through either (a) aligned de-novo AGI (which needs to be at least powerful enough to safely prevent maligned systems from undergoing intelligence explosions) or (b) very large amounts of global coordination (which would be necessary to either take our time & go cautiously, or to leap all the way to WBE without someone creating a neuromorph first). Both paths look pretty hard to walk, but in short, (a) looks slightly more promising to me. (Though I strongly support any attempts to widen path (b)!)
(2) It seems to me that the default path leads almost entirely to UFAI: insofar as MIRI research makes it easier for others to create UFAI, most of that effect isn't replacing wins with losses, it's just making the losses happen sooner. By contrast, this sort of work seems necessary in order to keep path (a) open. I don't see many other options. (In other words, I think it's net positive because it creates some wins and moves some losses sooner, and that seems like a fair trade to me.)
To make that a bit more concrete, consider logical uncertainty: if we attain a good formal understanding of logically uncertain reasoning, that's quite likely to shorten AI timelines. But I think I'd rather have a 10-year time horizon and be dealing with practical systems built upon solid foundations that come from a decade's worth of formally understanding what good logically uncertain reasoning looks like, rather than a 20-year time horizon where we have to deal with systems built using 19 years of hacks and 1 year of patches bolted on at the end.
(In other words, the possibility of improving AI capabilities is the price you have to pay to keep path (a) open.)
A bunch of other factors also play into my considerations (including a heuristic which says "the best way to figure out which problems are the real problems is to start solving the things that appear to be the problems," and another heuristic which says "if you see a big fire, try to put it out, and don't spend too much time worrying about whether putting it out might actually start worse fires elsewhere", and a bunch of others), but those are the big considerations, I think.