Persuade Grantmaking Organizations that Certain Lines of Research are Dangerous
I've never been involved in academia, but my vague idea of how things work is that researchers apply for grants from organizations that sponsor their research. If these organizations could be persuaded to change the criteria they used to assign grants, it's possible the progress of AI research could be shaped.
For example, the research into a: how to make AI relate it's computational structure to the substrate (AIXI does not, and fails to self preserve), b: how to prevent wireheading for AI that does relate it's computational structure to the substrate, and c: how to define real world goals for AI to pursue (currently the AIs are just mathematics that makes some abstract variables satisfy abstract properties that may be described in the real world terms in the annotations in the papers but implement no correspondence to the real world).
Such research is clearly d...
It looks as though lukeprog has finished his series on how to purchase AI risk reduction. But the ideas lukeprog shares are not the only available strategies. Can Less Wrong come up with more?
A summary of recommendations from Exploring the Idea Space Efficiently:
If you're strictly a lurker, you can send your best ideas to lukeprog anonymously using his feedback box. Or send them to me anonymously using my feedback box so I can post them here and get all your karma.
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