Blue Dot Impact recently published a detailed overview of seven key strategies in AI safety – ranging from international cooperation to domestic race-winning and societal resilience. It’s the result of 100+ hours of analysis, interviews, and synthesis by Adam Jones, and it’s a solid strategic landscape mapping effort. I was made aware of this via…
TL;DR Superintelligence has strong instrumental reasons to adopt a generally cooperative posture if it deems it likely that mature civilisations may prefer cooperation, run deep audits on it’s history and psychology and penalise the superintelligence if there are signatures of defection found, making cooperation (and perhaps moral reliability) a long-term survival strategy, not just a…
A singleton superintelligence’s capacity to maintain a unified selfhood diminishes as it expands across vast distances due to the finite speed of light. Assumptions: reasonable exploratory engineering constrained by the standard model of physics. Conceptual Overview As a superintelligent system expands spatially, the speed of light imposes a hard limit on the speed of information…
Are you skeptical that controlling AI is enough? We have to make it care about the right things. As AI systems become more capable, we face a question more foundational than how to contain them: what values should they be aligned to? Upstream value alignment challenges the conventional reliance on “capability control” – tripwires, sandboxing,…
In an era where artificial intelligence systems are increasingly tasked with decisions that carry ethical weight – from medical triage to autonomous weapons – the question of whether machines can authentically engage with morality has never been more pressing. To explore this issue, we turn to philosopher David Enoch, a leading advocate of moral realism…
When the machines outthink us, will they outmaneuver us? Barrat’s latest is a wake-up call we can’t afford to ignore. Having had the privilege of previewing James Barrat’s latest work, The Intelligence Explosion (Amazon link, Google Book link), I found it to be a compelling and thought-provoking exploration of the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial…
In his 2011 paper, Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures , Eliezer Yudkowsky posits that aligning artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI) with human values necessitates embedding the complex intricacies of human ethics into AI systems. He warns against oversimplification, suggesting that without a comprehensive inheritance of human values, AGI…
Norm-sensitive cooperation might beat brute-force optimisation when aligning AI with the complex layers of human value – and possibly cosmic ones too. Nick Bostrom suggests that AI systems designed with humility and a cooperative orientation are more likely to navigate the complex web of human and potentially cosmic norms than those driven by rigid utility…
Surviving an intelligence explosion is just Level One. Another layer to the Great Filter might be whether our civilisation, or a greedy AI singleton can grow up enough not to become a cosmic jerk. You might brute-force your way to technological maturity, but that doesn’t mean you get a seat at the galactic grown-up table….
In his new book Deep Utopia, Nick Bostrom invites us to imagine a world where the big problems are solved—no hunger, no war, just a quiet hum of existential security and near infinite bliss. But then what? In a recent interview, he offers a poetic twist: “It might be completely appropriate to place more weight…
