Organizing my university's EA student group and self-studying to become an AI alignment researcher. I want to maximally reduce the risk of superintelligent agents killing everyone and/or sentient digital systems experiencing astronomical amounts of suffering. Also interested in entrepreneurship and changing institutions to use better-designed incentive systems (see mechanism design).
80,000 Hours had an article with advice for new college students, and a section towards the end touches on your question.
Make sure to check out OpenPhil's undergraduate scholarship if you haven't yet.
Here are a couple of excerpts from relevant comments from the Astral Codex Ten post about the tournament. From the anecdotes, it seems as though this tournament had some flaws in execution, namely that the "superforcasters" weren't all that. But I want to see more context if anyone has it.
From Jacob:
From magic9mushroom:
Same reason we haven't been destroyed by a nuclear apocalypse yet: if we had, we wouldn't be here talking about it.
As for the question "why haven't we encountered a power-seeking AGI from elsewhere in the universe who didn't destroy us", I don't know.
I can look into how to set up a torrent link tomorrow and let you know how it goes!
Can we set up a torrent link for this?
Rational Animations is probably the YouTube channel the report is referring to, in case anyone's curious.
Where did you copy the quote from?
Suggestion: use a well-designed voting system such as STAR voting, approval voting, or quadratic voting.
I plan to do some self-studying in my free time over the summer, on topics I would describe as "most useful to know in the pursuit of making the technological singularity go well". Obviously, this includes technical topics within AI alignment, but I've been itching to learn a broad range of subjects to make better decisions about, for example, what position I should work in to have the most counterfactual impact or what research agendas are most promising. I believe this is important because I aim to eventually attempt something really ambitious like founding an organization, which would require especially good judgement and generalist knowledge. What advice do you have on prioritizing topics to self-study and for how much depth? Any other thoughts or resources about my endeavor? I would be super grateful to have a call with you if this is something you've thought a lot about (Calendly link). More context: I'm a undergraduate sophomore studying Computer Science.
So far, my ordered list includes:
I think it's important to give the audience some sort of analogy that they're already familiar with, such as evolution producing humans, humans introducing invasive species in new environments, and viruses. These are all examples of "agents in complex environments which aren't malicious or Machiavellian, but disrupt the original group of agents anyway".
I believe these analogies are not object-level enough to be arguments for AI X-risk in themselves, but I think they're a good way to help people quickly understand the danger of a superintelligent, goal-directed agent.