Well, the goal is to predict your personal observations, in MWI you have huge wavefunction on which you need to somehow select the subjective you. The predictor will need code for this, whenever you call it mechanism or not. Furthermore, you need to actually derive Born probabilities from some first principles somehow if you want to make a case for MWI. Deriving those, that's what would be interesting, actually making it more compact (if the stuff you're adding as extra 'first principles' is smaller than collapse). Also, btw, CI doesn't have any actual mechanism for collapse, it's strictly a very un-physical trick.
Much more interestingly, Solomonoff probability hints that one should try really to search for something that would predict beyond probability distributions. I.e. search for objective collapse of some kind. Other issue: QM actually has problem at macroscopic scale, it doesn't add up to general relativity (without nasty hacks), so we are matter of factly missing something, and this whole issue is really silly argument over nothing as what we have is just a calculation rule that happens to work but we know is wrong somewhere anyway. I think that's the majority opinion on the issue. Postulating a zillion worlds based on known broken model would be tad silly. I think basically most physicists believe neither in collapse as in CI (beyond believing its a trick that works) nor believe in many worlds, because forming either belief would be wrong.
Much more interestingly, Solomonoff probability hints that one should try really to search for something that would predict beyond probability distributions. I.e. search for objective collapse of some kind.
We face logical uncertainty here. We do not know if there is a theory of objective collapse that more compactly describes our current universe then MWI or random collapse does. I am inclined to believe that the answer is "no". This issue seems very subtle, and differences on it do not seem clear enough to damn an entire organization.
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Series: How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction
Another method for purchasing AI risk reduction is to raise the safety-consciousness of researchers doing work related to AGI.
The Singularity Institute is conducting a study of scientists who decided to either (1) stop researching some topic after realizing it might be dangerous, or who (2) forked their career into advocacy, activism, ethics, etc. because they became concerned about the potential negative consequences of their work. From this historical inquiry we hope to learn some things about what causes scientists to become so concerned about the consequences of their work that they take action. Some of the examples we've found so far: Michael Michaud (resigned from SETI in part due to worries about the safety of trying to contact ET), Joseph Rotblat (resigned from the Manhattan Project before the end of the war due to concerns about the destructive impact of nuclear weapons), and Paul Berg (became part of a self-imposed moratorium on recombinant DNA back when it was still unknown how dangerous this new technology could be).
What else can be done?
Naturally, these efforts should be directed toward researchers who are both highly competent and whose work is very relevant to development toward AGI: researchers like Josh Tenenbaum, Shane Legg, and Henry Markram.