One method would be to take advantage of low-hanging fruit not directly related to X-risk. Clearly motivation isn't enough to solve these problems (and I'm not just talking about alignment), so we should be trying to optimize all our resources, and that includes getting rid of major bottlenecks like [the imagined example of] hunger killing intelligent, benevolent potential-researchers in particular areas because of a badly-designed shipping route.
A real-life example of this would be the efforts of the Rationalist community to promote more efficient methods of non-scientific analysis (i.e. cases where you don't have the effort required for scientific findings, but want a right answer anyway). This helps not only in X-risk efforts, but also in the preliminary stages of academic research, and [presumably] entrepreneurship as well. We could step up our efforts in this, particularly in college environments where it would influence people's effectiveness whether or not they bought into other aspects of this subgroup's culture like the urgency of anti-X-risk measures.
Another aspect is to diverge in multiple different directions. We're essentially searching for a miracle at this point (to my understanding, in the Death with Dignity post Eliezer's main reason to reject unethical behaviors that might, maybe, possibly lead to success is that they're still less reliable than miracles and reduce our chances of finding any). So we need a much broader range of approaches to solving or avoiding these problems, to increase the likelihood that we get close enough to a miracle solution to spot it.
For instance, most effort on AGI safety so far has focused on the alignment and control problems, but we might want to put more attention to how we might keep up with a self-optimizing AGI by augmenting ourselves, so that human society was never dominated by an inhuman (and thus likely unaligned) cognition. This would involve both the existing line of study in Intelligence Augmentation (IA), but also ways to integrate it with AI insights to keep ahead of an AI in its likely fields of superiority, and also relates to the social landscape of AI in that we'd need to draw resources and progress away from autonomous AI and towards IA.
One method would be to take advantage of low-hanging fruit not directly related to X-risk. Clearly motivation isn't enough to solve these problems (and I'm not just talking about alignment), so we should be trying to optimize all our resources, and that includes getting rid of major bottlenecks like [the imagined example of] hunger killing intelligent, benevolent potential-researchers in particular areas because of a badly-designed shipping route.
A real-life example of this would be the efforts of the Rationalist community to promote more efficient methods of non-scientific analysis (i.e. cases where you don't have the effort required for scientific findings, but want a right answer anyway). This helps not only in X-risk efforts, but also in the preliminary stages of academic research, and [presumably] entrepreneurship as well. We could step up our efforts in this, particularly in college environments where it would influence people's effectiveness whether or not they bought into other aspects of this subgroup's culture like the urgency of anti-X-risk measures.
Another aspect is to diverge in multiple different directions. We're essentially searching for a miracle at this point (to my understanding, in the Death with Dignity post Eliezer's main reason to reject unethical behaviors that might, maybe, possibly lead to success is that they're still less reliable than miracles and reduce our chances of finding any). So we need a much broader range of approaches to solving or avoiding these problems, to increase the likelihood that we get close enough to a miracle solution to spot it.
For instance, most effort on AGI safety so far has focused on the alignment and control problems, but we might want to put more attention to how we might keep up with a self-optimizing AGI by augmenting ourselves, so that human society was never dominated by an inhuman (and thus likely unaligned) cognition. This would involve both the existing line of study in Intelligence Augmentation (IA), but also ways to integrate it with AI insights to keep ahead of an AI in its likely fields of superiority, and also relates to the social landscape of AI in that we'd need to draw resources and progress away from autonomous AI and towards IA.
"Like if we increased yearly economic growth by 5% (for example 2% to 2.1%), what effect would you expect that to have?"
From my personal experience, academics have a tendency and preference to work on superficially-beneficial problems; Manhattan Projects and AI alignment groups both exist (detrimental and non-obviously beneficial, respectively), but for the most part we have projects like eco-friendly technology and efficient resource allocation in specified domains.
Due to this, greater economic growth means more resources to bring to bear for other scient... (read more)