A wild guess. FHI believes that the best what can reasonably be done about existential risks at this point in time is to do research into existential risks, including possible unknown unknowns, and into strategies to reduce current existential risks. This somewhat agrees with their FAQ:
Research into existential risk and analysis of potential countermeasures is a very strong candidate for being the currently most cost-effective way to reduce existential risk. This includes research into some methodological problems and into certain strategic questions that pertain to existential risk. Similarly, actions that contribute indirectly to producing more high-quality analysis on existential risk and a capacity later to act on the result of such analysis could also be extremely cost-effective. This includes, for example, donating money to existential risk research, supporting organizations and networks that engage in fundraising for existential risks work, and promoting wider awareness of the topic and its importance.
In other words, FHI seems to focus on meta issues, existential risks in general, rather than associated specifics.
Suppose you buy the argument that humanity faces both the risk of AI-caused extinction and the opportunity to shape an AI-built utopia. What should we do about that? As Wei Dai asks, "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive intelligence explosion?"
This post serves as a table of contents and an introduction for an ongoing strategic analysis of AI risk and opportunity.
Contents:
Why discuss AI safety strategy?
The main reason to discuss AI safety strategy is, of course, to draw on a wide spectrum of human expertise and processing power to clarify our understanding of the factors at play and the expected value of particular interventions we could invest in: raising awareness of safety concerns, forming a Friendly AI team, differential technological development, investigating AGI confinement methods, and others.
Discussing AI safety strategy is also a challenging exercise in applied rationality. The relevant issues are complex and uncertain, but we need to take advantage of the fact that rationality is faster than science: we can't "try" a bunch of intelligence explosions and see which one works best. We'll have to predict in advance how the future will develop and what we can do about it.
Core readings
Before engaging with this series, I recommend you read at least the following articles:
Example questions
Which strategic questions would we like to answer? Muehlhauser (2011) elaborates on the following questions:
Salamon & Muehlhauser (2013) list several other questions gathered from the participants of a workshop following Singularity Summit 2011, including:
These are the kinds of questions we will be tackling in this series of posts for Less Wrong Discussion, in order to improve our predictions about which direction we can nudge the future to maximize the chances of a positive intelligence explosion.