As AI systems grow more powerful, ensuring they act ethically – the AI alignment problem – becomes critical. Traditionally, AI alignment efforts have assumed morality is a matter of human values or preferences (a moral anti-realist stance). Influential voices in the AI safety community, like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Richard Ngo, often treat ethics as subjective…
Greg Sadler, the CEO of Good Ancestors Policy, is working to help members of communities in Australia advocate for the positions that they think are important and the policies that they value the most. Greg has over 10 years’ experience in the Australian Public Service, including at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet,…
Nick Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” (VWH) explores the idea that technological development could expose vulnerabilities, making it extraordinarily easy for individuals or small groups to cause widespread harm. The hypothesis presents various scenarios, categorized into different “balls” from a hypothetical “urn of invention“, symbolizing different types of technological developments: Bostrom suggests that as humanity pulls…
Below is a video recording of Peter Singer’s talk ‘Animal Liberation Now’ at Melbourne uni in Aug 2023. Few books maintain their relevance – and have remained continuously in print – nearly 50 years after they were first published.Animal Liberation, one of TIME’s “All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books” is one such book. Since its original…
The concept of digital twins combined with engineering simulation is an exciting framework for professionals working to improve medical devices in biomedicine. A digital twin acts as a virtual representation or digital replica of a physical object, system, processes which can include parts of the human body. Digital twins can be applied to medical devices…
Dr Simon Goldstein is an associate professor at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at ACU. In 2023, he is a research fellow at the Center for AI Safety. Simon’s research focuses on AI safety, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Before ACU, Simon was an assistant professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Simon received my…
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
Our scientific observations are not pristine windows to reality; they are tinted by the theoretical frameworks and conceptual schemes that scaffold our interpretations, often smuggling in with them implicit assumptions of the very thesis they’re meant to support. We don’t simply absorb the world as it is; rather, we interpret it through the filter of…
Our scientific observations are not pristine windows to reality; they are tinted by the theoretical frameworks and conceptual schemes that scaffold our interpretations, often smuggling in with them implicit assumptions of the very thesis they’re meant to support. We don’t simply absorb the world as it is; rather, we interpret it through the filter of…
Here, Adam Ford interviews OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Adam Ford: What is the anatomical basis for raw feels? ChatGPT: I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “raw feels.” Could you please provide some more context or clarify your question? Adam Ford: By “raw feels” I mean pleasure and suffering. ChatGPT: Pleasure and suffering are subjective experiences,…
