WM

William_MacAskill

7238 karmaJoined Aug 2014

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193

Thanks! Didn't know you're sceptical of AI x-risk. I wonder if there's a correlation between being a philosopher and having low AI x-risk estimates; it seems that way anecdotally. 

Thanks so much for those links, I hadn't seen them! 

(So much AI-related stuff coming out every day, it's so hard to keep on top of everything!)

This is a quick post to talk a little bit about what I’m planning to focus on in the near and medium-term future, and to highlight that I’m currently hiring for a joint executive and research assistant position. You can read more about the role and apply here! If you’re potentially interested, hopefully the comments below can help you figure out whether you’d enjoy the role. 

Recent advances in AI, combined with economic modelling (e.g. here), suggest that we might well face explosive AI-driven growth in technological capability in the next decade, where what would have been centuries of technological and intellectual progress on a business-as-usual trajectory occur over the course of just months or years.

Most effort to date, from those worried by an intelligence explosion, has been on ensuring that AI systems are aligned: that they do what their designers intend them to do, at least closely enough that they don’t cause catastrophically bad outcomes. 

But even if we make sufficient progress on alignment, humanity will have to make, or fail to make, many hard-to-reverse decisions with important and long-lasting consequences. I call these decisions Grand Challenges. Over the course of an explosion in technological capability, we will have to address many Grand Challenges in a short space of time including, potentially: what rights to give digital beings; how to govern the development of many new weapons of mass destruction; who gets control over an automated military; how to deal with fast-reproducing human or AI citizens; how to maintain good reasoning and decision-making even despite powerful persuasion technology and greatly-improved ability to ideologically indoctrinate others; and how to govern the race for space resources. 

As a comparison, we could imagine if explosive growth had occurred in Europe in the 11th century, and that all the intellectual and technological advances that took a thousand years in our actual history occurred over the course of just a few years. It’s hard to see how decision-making would go well under those conditions.

The governance of explosive growth seems to me to be of comparable importance as AI alignment, not dramatically less tractable, and is currently much more neglected. The marginal cost-effectiveness of work in this area therefore seems to be even higher than marginal work on AI alignment. It is, however, still very pre-paradigmatic: it’s hard to know what’s most important in this area, what things would be desirable to push on, or even what good research looks like.

I’ll talk more about all this in my EAG: Bay Area talk, “New Frontiers in Effective Altruism.” I’m far from the only person to highlight these issues, though. For example, Holden Karnofsky has an excellent blog post on issues beyond misalignment; Lukas Finnveden has a great post on similar themes here and an extensive and in-depth series on potential projects here. More generally, I think there’s a lot of excitement about work in this broad area that isn’t yet being represented in places like the Forum. I’d be keen for more people to start learning about and thinking about these issues. 

Over the last year, I’ve done a little bit of exploratory research into some of these areas; over the next six months, I plan to continue this in a focused way, with an eye toward making this a multi-year focus. In particular, I’m interested in the rights of digital beings, governance of space resources, and, above all, on the “meta” challenge of ensuring that we have good deliberative processes through the period of explosive growth. (One can think of work on the meta challenge as fleshing out somewhat realistic proposals that could take us in the direction of the “long reflection”.) By working on good deliberative processes, we could thereby improve decision-making on all the Grand Challenges we will face. This work could also help with AI safety, too: if we can guarantee power-sharing after the development of superintelligence, that decreases the incentive for competitors to race and cut corners on safety.

I’m not sure yet what output this would ultimately lead to, if I decide to continue work on this beyond the next six months. Plausibly there could be many possible books, policy papers, or research institutes on these issues, and I’d be excited to help make happen whichever of these seem highest-impact after further investigation.

Beyond this work, I’ll continue to provide support for individuals and organisations in EA (such as via fundraising, advice, advocacy and passing on opportunities) in an 80/20 way; most likely, I’ll just literally allocate 20% of my time to this, and spend the remaining 80% on the ethics and governance issues I list above. I expect not to be very involved with organisational decision-making (for example by being on boards of EA organisations) in the medium term, in order to stay focused and play to my comparative advantage.  

I’m looking for a joint research and executive assistant to help with the work outlined above. The role involves research tasks such as providing feedback on drafts, conducting literature reviews and small research projects, as well as administrative tasks like processing emails, scheduling, and travel booking. The role could also turn into a more senior role, depending on experience and performance.

Example projects that a research assistant could help with include:

  • A literature review on the drivers of moral progress.
  • A “literature review” focused on reading through LessWrong, the EA Forum, and other blogs, and finding the best work there related to the fragility of value thesis.
  • Case studies on: What exactly happened to result in the creation of the UN, and the precise nature of the UN Charter? What can we learn from it? Similarly for The Kyoto Protocol, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, the Montreal Protocol.
  • Short original research projects, such as:
    • Figuring out what a good operationalisation of transformative AI would be, for the purpose of creating an early tripwire to alert the world of an imminent intelligence explosion.
    • Taking some particular neglected Grand Challenge, and fleshing out the reasons why this Grand Challenge might or might not be a big deal. 
    • Supposing that the US wanted to make an agreement to share power and respect other countries’ sovereignty in the event that it develops superintelligence, figuring out how we could legibly guarantee future compliance with that agreement, such that the commitment is credible to other countries? 


The deadline for applications is February the 11th. If this seems interesting, please apply!

I'm really excited about Zach coming on board as CEA's new CEO! 

Though I haven't worked with him a ton, the interactions I have had with him have been systematically positive: he's been consistently professional, mission-focused and inspiring. He helped lead EV US well through what was a difficult time, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what CEA achieves under his leadership!

Thank you so much for your work with EV over the last year, Howie! It was enormously helpful to have someone so well-trusted, with such excellent judgment, in this position. I’m sure you’ll have an enormous positive impact at Open Phil.

And welcome, Rob - I think it’s fantastic news that you’ve taken the role!

I mentioned a few months ago that I was planning to resign from the board of EV UK: I’ve now officially done so.

Since last November, I’ve been recused from the board on all matters associated with FTX and related topics, which has ended up being a large proportion of board business. (This is because the recusal affected not just decisions that were directly related to the collapse of FTX, but also many other decisions for which the way EV UK has been affected by the collapse of FTX was important context.) I know I initially said that I’d wait for there to be more capacity, but trustee recruitment has moved more slowly than I’d anticipated, and with the ongoing recusal I didn’t expect to add much capacity for the foreseeable future, so it felt like a natural time to step down.  

It’s been quite a ride over the last eleven years. Effective Ventures has grown to a size far beyond what I expected, and I’ve felt privileged to help it on that journey. I deeply respect the rest of the board, and the leadership teams at EV, and I’m glad they’re at the helm.

Some people have asked me what I’m currently working on, and what my plans are. This year has been quite spread over a number of different things, including fundraising, helping out other EA-adjacent public figures, support for GPI, CEA and 80,000 Hours, writing additions to What We Owe The Future and helping with the print textbook version of utilitarianism.net that’s coming out next year. It’s also personally been the toughest year of my life; my mental health has been at its worst in over a decade, and I’ve been trying to deal with that, too.

At the moment, I’m doing three main things:

- Some public engagement, in particular around the WWOTF paperback and foreign language book launches and at EAGxBerlin. This has been and will be lower-key than the media around WWOTF last year, and more focused on in-person events; I’m also more focused on fundraising than I was before. 

- Research into "trajectory changes”: in particular, ways of increasing the wellbeing of future generations other than 'standard' existential risk mitigation strategies, in particular on issues that arise even if we solve AI alignment, like digital sentience and the long reflection. I’m also doing some learning to try to get to grips on how to update properly on the latest developments in AI, in particular with respect to the probability of an intelligence explosion in the next decade, and on how hard we should expect AI alignment to be.

- Gathering information for what I should focus on next. In the medium term, I still plan to be a public proponent of EA-as-an-idea, which I think plays to my comparative advantage, and because I’m worried about people neglecting “EA qua EA”. If anything, all the crises faced by EA and by the world in the last year has reminded me of just how deeply I believe in EA as a project, and how the message of taking a thoughtful, humble, and scientific approach to doing good is more important than ever. The precise options I’m considering are still quite wide-ranging, including: a podcast and/or YouTube show and/or substack; a book on effective giving; a book on evidence-based living; or deeper research into the ethics and governance questions that arise even if we solve AI alignment. I hope to decide on that by the end of the year.

(My personal views only, and like Nick I've been recused from a lot of board work since November.)

Thank you, Nick, for all your work on the Boards over the last eleven years. You helped steward the organisations into existence, and were central to helping them flourish and grow. I’ve always been impressed by your work ethic, your willingness to listen and learn, and your ability to provide feedback that was incisive, helpful, and kind.

Because you’ve been less in the limelight than me or Toby, I think many people don’t know just how crucial a role you played in EA’s early days. Though you joined shortly after launch, given all your work on it I think you were essentially a third cofounder of Giving What We Can; you led its research for many years, and helped build vital bridges with GiveWell and later Open Philanthropy. I remember that when you launched Giving What We Can: Rutgers, you organised a talk with I think over 500 people. It must still be one of the most well-attended talks that we’ve ever had within EA, and helped the idea of local groups get off the ground.

The EA movement wouldn’t have been the same without your service. It’s been an honour to have worked with you.

Hey,

I’m really sorry to hear about this experience. I’ve also experienced what feels like social pressure to have particular beliefs (e.g. around non-causal decision theory, high AI x-risk estimates, other general pictures of the world), and it’s something I also don’t like about the movement. My biggest worries with my own beliefs stem around the worry that I’d have very different views if I’d found myself in a different social environment. It’s just simply very hard to successfully have a group of people who are trying to both figure out what’s correct and trying to change the world: from the perspective of someone who thinks the end of the world is imminent, someone who doesn’t agree is at best useless and at worst harmful (because they are promoting misinformation).

In local groups in particular, I can see how this issue can get aggravated: people want their local group to be successful, and it’s much easier to track success with a metric like “number of new AI safety researchers” than “number of people who have thought really deeply about the most pressing issues and have come to their own well-considered conclusions”. 

One thing I’ll say is that core researchers are often (but not always) much more uncertain and pluralist than it seems from “the vibe”. The second half of Holden Karnofsky’s recent 80k blog post is indicative. Open Phil splits their funding across quite a number of cause areas, and I expect that to continue. Most of the researchers at GPI are pretty sceptical of AI x-risk. Even among people who are really worried about TAI in the next decade, there’s normally significant support (whether driven by worldview diversification or just normal human psychology) for neartermist or other non-AI causes. That’s certainly true of me. I think longtermism is highly non-obvious, and focusing on near-term AI risk even more so; beyond that, I think a healthy EA movement should be highly intellectually diverse and exploratory. 

What should be done? I have a few thoughts, but my most major best guess is that, now that AI safety is big enough and getting so much attention, it should have its own movement, separate from EA. Currently, AI has an odd relationship to EA. Global health and development and farm animal welfare, and to some extent pandemic preparedness, had movements working on them independently of EA. In contrast, AI safety work currently overlaps much more heavily with the EA/rationalist community, because it’s more homegrown. 

If AI had its own movement infrastructure, that would give EA more space to be its own thing. It could more easily be about the question “how can we do the most good?” and a portfolio of possible answers to that question, rather than one increasingly common answer — “AI”.

At the moment, I’m pretty worried that, on the current trajectory, AI safety will end up eating EA. Though I’m very worried about what the next 5-10 years will look like in AI, and though I think we should put significantly more resources into AI safety even than we have done, I still think that AI safety eating EA would be a major loss. EA qua EA, which can live and breathe on its own terms, still has huge amounts of value: if AI progress slows; if it gets so much attention that it’s no longer neglected; if it turns out the case for AI safety was wrong in important ways; and because there are other ways of adding value to the world, too. I think most people in EA, even people like Holden who are currently obsessed with near-term AI risk, would agree. 

This isn't answering the question you ask (sorry), but one possible response to this line of criticism is for some people within EA / longtermism  to more clearly state what vision of the future they are aiming towards. Because this tends not to happen, it means that critics can attribute particular visions to people that they don't have. In particular, critics of WWOTF often thought that I was trying to push for some particular narrow vision of the future, whereas really the primary goal, in my mind at least, is to keep our options open as much as possible, and make moral progress in order to figure out what sort of future we should try to create.

Here are a couple of suggestions for positive visions. These are what I'd answer if asked: "What vision of the future are you aiming towards?":

"Procedural visions"
(Name options:  Viatopia - representing the idea of a waypoint, and of keeping multiple paths open - though this mixes latin and greek roots. Optiotopia, though is a mouthful and mixes latin and greek roots. Related ideas: existential security, the long reflection.)

These doesn't have some vision of what we ultimately want to achieve. Instead they propose a waypoint that we'd want to achieve, as a step on the path to a good future. That waypoint would involve: (i) ending all obvious grievous contemporary harms, like war, violence and unnecessary suffering; (ii) reducing existential risk down to a very low level; (iii) securing a deliberative process for humanity as a whole, so that we make sufficient moral progress before embarking on potentially-irreversible actions like space settlement.  

The hope could be that almost everyone could agree on this as a desirable waypoint.

"Utopia for everyone"
(Name options: multitopia or pluritopia, but this mixes latin and greek roots; polytopia, but this is the name of a computer game. Related idea: Paretopia.)

This vision is where a great diversity of different visions of the good are allowed to happen, and people have choice about what sort of society they want to live in. Environmentalists could preserve Earth's ecosystems; others can build off-world societies. Liberals and libertarians can create a society where everyone is empowered to act autonomously, pursuing their own goals; lovers of knowledge can build societies devoted to figuring out the deepest truths of the universe; philosophical hedonists can create societies devoted to joy, and so on.

The key insight, here, is that there's just a lot of available stuff in the future, and that scientific, social and moral progress will potentially enable us to produce great wealth with that stuff (if we don't destroy the world first, or suffer value lock-in). Plausibly, if we as a global society get our act together, the large majority of moral perspectives can get most of what they want. 

Like the procedural visions, spelling this vision out more could have great benefits today, via greater collaboration: if we could agree that this is what we'll aim for, at least in part, then we could reduce the chance of some person or people with some narrow view trying to grab power for itself.

(I write about these a little bit about both of these idea in a fictional short story, here.)

I'd welcome name ideas for these, especially the former. My best guesses so far are "viatopia" and "multitopia", but I'm not wedded to them and I haven't spent lots of time on naming. I don't think that the -topia suffix is strictly necessary.

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