Kaj_Sotala comments on Friendly AI Research and Taskification - Less Wrong
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Comments (44)
I'm not speaking for SIAI as this is more of a Visiting Fellows thing than an SIAI thing, but there are people working on Friendliness, and creating a Friendliness roadmap. We have lists of hundreds of problems, and lists of potentially relevant fields or concepts. Work is getting started on combining these lists into a real roadmap despite the uncertainty and difference of emphasis among researchers. Obviously we'd rather not release things for the public to see unless there were rather good reasons for doing so -- less output means less chance for screwing up public relations, which is important because SIAI Visiting Fellows output is easy to conflate with SIAI output in ways that might be misleading. I've started a blog where I'll put my own thoughts on something-like-Friendliness that I feel are not at all dangerous, and I might encourage other Friendliness researchers to do so as well. I'll link to my blog in a discussion post once I have a few more posts seeded. At some point you might see summaries of collaborative research somewhere. But until we have a better idea of who our audience is and what security precautions are sane, we'd like to work quietly. Again, I'm mostly speaking for myself, kind of speaking for a group of partially-SIAI-affiliated folk, and not at all for SIAI as an organization.
(There aren't that many people that can speak for SIAI, unfortunately. Like, two maybe. If you're an Oppenheimer (strong rationality and remarkable ability to get uber-nerds to work like a well-oiled machine), please consider applying for Visiting Fellowship. We're a bright group, but that has more to do with being bright than it has to do with being a group, and we'd like to change that.)
Meh. Now I'm a bit annoyed in that I did try to poke people into a direction where they'd do something like that when I was there as a Visiting Fellow, but mostly the reaction seemed to be "we should leave all thinking about Friendliness to Eliezer". But upon reflection, I realize that I may not have been as vocal about that as I thought I was (illusion of transparency and all that), so I guess I only have myself to blame for you guys only starting on all the real interesting stuff after I left. ;p
That's... disturbing, although expected. Why isn't Visiting Fellows program used to strengthen this line of research? There could be practical difficulties in moving there quickly, but it's confusing if it's not even a goal.
Huh? But, but... surely there room for at least half a dozen people in that particular basement!