I thought "making math progress and trying to get mathematicians in academia interested in these kinds of problems" was intended to be preparation
Yes, I believe that is indeed the intention, but it's worth noting that the things that MIRI's currently doing really allow them to pursue either strategy in the future. So if they give up on the "small FAI team" strategy because it turns out to be too hard, they may still pursue the "big academic research" strategy, based on the information collected at this and other steps.
If "small FAI team" is not a good idea, then I don't see what purpose "making math progress and trying to get mathematicians in academia interested in these kinds of problems" serves, or how experimenting with it is useful.
"Small FAI team" might turn out to be a bad idea because the problem is too difficult for a small team to solve alone. In that case, it may be useful to actually offload most of the problems to a broader academic community. Of course, this may or may not be safe, but there may come a time when it turns out that it is the least risky alternative.
I think "big academic research" is almost certainly not safe, for reasons similar to my argument to Paul here. There are people who do not care about AI safety due to short planning horizons or because they think they have simple, easy to transmit values, and will deploy the results of such research before the AI safety work is complete.
Of course, this may or may not be safe, but there may come a time when it turns out that it is the least risky alternative.
This would be a fine argument if there weren't immediate downsides to what MIRI is cu...
On the subject of how an FAI team can avoid accidentally creating a UFAI, Carl Shulman wrote:
In the history of philosophy, there have been many steps in the right direction, but virtually no significant problems have been fully solved, such that philosophers can agree that some proposed idea can be the last words on a given subject. An FAI design involves making many explicit or implicit philosophical assumptions, many of which may then become fixed forever as governing principles for a new reality. They'll end up being last words on their subjects, whether we like it or not. Given the history of philosophy and applying the outside view, how can an FAI team possibly reach "very high standards of proof" regarding the safety of a design? But if we can foresee that they can't, then what is the point of aiming for that predictable outcome now?
Until recently I haven't paid a lot of attention to the discussions here about inside view vs outside view, because the discussions have tended to focus on the applicability of these views to the problem of predicting intelligence explosion. It seemed obvious to me that outside views can't possibly rule out intelligence explosion scenarios, and even a small probability of a future intelligence explosion would justify a much higher than current level of investment in preparing for that possibility. But given that the inside vs outside view debate may also be relevant to the "FAI Endgame", I read up on Eliezer and Luke's most recent writings on the subject... and found them to be unobjectionable. Here's Eliezer:
Does anyone want to argue that Eliezer's criteria for using the outside view are wrong, or don't apply here?
And Luke:
These ideas seem harder to apply, so I'll ask for readers' help. What reference classes should we use here, in addition to past attempts to solve philosophical problems? What inside view adjustments could a future FAI team make, such that they might justifiably overcome (the most obvious-to-me) outside view's conclusion that they're very unlikely to be in the possession of complete and fully correct solutions to a diverse range of philosophical problems?