All of wonder's Comments + Replies

I share some similar frustrations, and unfortunately these are also prevalent in other parts of the human society. The commonality of most of these fakeness seem to be impure intentions - there are impure/non-intrinsic motivations other than producing the best science/making true progress. Some of these motivations unfortunately could be based on survival/monetary pressure, and resolving that for true research or progress seems to be critical. We need to encourage a culture of pure motivations, and also equip ourselves with more ability/tools to distinguish extrinsic motivations.

Would the take over for small countries also about humans using just an advanced AI for taking over? (or would the human using advanced AI for take over happen faster?)

Maybe I missed this in the article itself - are there plans to make sure the superbabies are aligned and will not abuse/overpower the non-engineered peers?

4GeneSmith
I certainly hope we can do this one day. The biobanks that gather data used to make the predictors we used to identify variants for editing don't really focus on much besides disease. As a result, our predictors for personality and interpersonal behavior aren't yet very good. I think as the popularity of embryo selection continues to increase, this kind of data will be gathered in exponentially increasing volumes, at which point we could start to think about editing or selecting for the kinds of traits you're describing. There will be an additional question to what degree parents will decide to edit for those traits. We're going to have a limited budget for editing and for selection for quite some time, so parents will have to choose to make their child kinder and more benificent to others at the expense of some other traits. The polygenicity of those personality traits and the effect sizes of the common alleles could have a very strong effect on parental choices; if you're only giving up a tiny bit to make your child kinder then I think most parents will go for it. If it's a big sacrifice because it requires like 100 edits, I think far fewer will do so. It may be that benificence towards others will make these kinds of children easier to raise as well, which I think many parents would be interested in.

I was thinking of this the other day as well; I think this is particularly a problem when we are evaluating misalignment based on these semantic wording. This may suggest the increasing need to pursue alternative ways to evaluate misalignment, rather than purely prompt based evaluation benchmarks

Based on my observations, I would also think some current publication chasing culture could get people push out papers more quickly (in some particular domains like CS), even though some papers may be partially completed

Will the event/sessions be recorded by any chance? (may not be able to attend, but would love to learn); additionally, would the topics be focused exclusively on relations to X risks?