For background and context, see my related series of posts on an approach for AI Safety Movement Building. This is a quick and concise rewrite of the main points in the hope that it will attract better engagement and feedback.
Which of the following assumptions do you agree or disagree with? Follow the links to see some of the related content from my posts.
Assumptions about the needs of the AI Safety community
- A lack of people, inputs, and coordination is (one of several issues) holding back progress in AI Safety. Only a small portion of potential contributors are focused on AI Safety, and current contributors face issues such as limited support, resources, and guidance.
- We need more (effective) movement builders to accelerate progress in AI Safety. Utilising diverse professions and skills, effective movement builders can increase contributors, contributions, and coordination within the AI Safety community, by starting, sustaining, and scaling useful projects. They can do so while getting supervision and support from those doing direct work and/or doing direct work themselves.
- To increase the number of effective AI Safety movement builders we need to reduce movement building uncertainty. Presently, it's unclear who should do what to help the AI Safety Community or how to prioritise between options for movement building. There is considerable disagreement between knowledgeable individuals in our diverse community. Most people are occupied with urgent object-level work, leaving no one responsible for understanding and communicating the community's needs.
- To reduce movement building uncertainty we need more shared understanding. Potential and current movement builders need a sufficiently good grasp of key variables such as contexts, processes, outcomes, and priorities to be able to work confidently and effectively.
- To achieve more shared understanding we need shared language. Inconsistencies in vocabulary and conceptualisations hinder our ability to survey and understand the AI Safety community's goals and priorities.
Assumption about the contribution of my series of posts
I couldn't find any foundation of shared language or understanding in AI Safety Movement building to work from, so I created this series of posts to share and sense-check mine as it developed and evolved. Based on this, I now assume:
- My post series offers a basic foundation for shared language and understanding in AI Safety Movement building, which most readers agree with. I haven't received much feedback but what I have received has generally been supportive. I could be making a premature judgement here so please share any disagreements you have.
Assumption about career paths to explore
If the above assumptions are valid then I have a good understanding of i) the AI Safety Community and what it needs, and ii) a basic foundation for shared language and understanding in AI Safety Movement building that I can build on. Given my experience with entrepreneurship, community building, and research, I therefore assume:
- It seems reasonable for me to explore if I can provide value by using the shared language and understanding to initiate/run/collaborate on projects that help to increase shared understanding & coordination within the AI Safety Community. For instance, this could involve evaluating progress in AI Safety Movement building and/or surveying the community to determine priorities. I will do this while doing Fractional Movement Building (e.g., allocating some of my productive time to movement building and some of my time for direct work/self-education).
Feedback/Sense-checking
Do you agree or disagree with any of the above assumptions? If you disagree then please explain why.
Your feedback will be greatly valued and will help with my career plans.
To encourage feedback I am offering a bounty. I will pay up to 200USD in Amazon vouchers, shared via email, to up to 10 people who give helpful feedback on this post or my previous posts in the series by 15/4/2023. I will also consider rewarding anonymous feedback left here (but you will need to give me an email address). I will likely share anonymous feedback if it seems constructive, and I think other people will benefit from seeing it.
Hey Hoagy, thanks for replying, I really appreciate it!
I fixed that link, thanks for pointing it out.
Here is a quick response to some of your points:
My feeling with the posts is that given the diversity of situations for people who are currently AI safety researchers, there's not likely to be a particular key set of understandings such that a person could walk into the community as a whole and know where they can be helpful.
I tend to feel that things could be much better with little effort. As an analogy, consider the difference between trying to pick a AI safety project to work on now, versus before we had curation and evaluation posts like this.
I'll note that those posts seem very useful but they are now almost a year out of date and were only ever based on a small set of opinions. It wouldn't be hard to have something much better.
Similarly, I think that there is room for a lot more of this "coordination work' here and lots of low-hanging fruit in general.
It's going to be more like here are the groups and organizations which are doing good work, what roles or other things do they need now, and what would help them scale up their ability to produce useful work.
This is exactly what I want to know! From my perspective effective movement builders can increase contributors, contributions, and coordination within the AI Safety community, by starting, sustaining, and scaling useful projects.
Relatedly, I think that we should ideally have some sort of community consensus gathering process to figure out what is good and bad movement building (e.g., who are the good/bad groups, and what do the collective set of good groups need).
The shared language stuff and all of what I produced in my post is mainly a means to that end. I really just want to make sure that before I survey the community to understand who wants what and why, there is some sort of standardised understanding and language about movement building so that people don't just write it off as a particular type of recruitment done without supervision by non-experts.