Value Risk (vrisk): The risk of bad to sub-optimal values happening. An obviously bad vrisk is one where existential risk (xrisk) is high. Existential here could mean extinction of life/species/sentience etc, or the universe becoming uninhabitable to the degree where there is no chance of new life emerging to experience anything. Extinction means local annihilation…
Alignment Challenges Given the critical role of ethics in AI safety, it’s deeply concerning to see such significant disagreement among experts who have rigorously studied ethics. The divergence in moral and meta-ethical perspectives among these experts poses a serious question: How can we effectively align AI if the very foundations of ethical understanding are not…
A discussion between David Pearce and James Hughes moderated by Adam Ford exploring the ethical and philosophical landscapes of AI, human enhancement and the future of emerging technologies affording higher states of well-being. Pearce and Hughes discuss the implications of transforming human experience via leveraging biotech and cybernetics, as well as requirements for AI to…
Can philosophical zombies be philosophical? Preamble There are various takes on what a p-zombie is, most of which were attempts to dethrone physicalism – this article isn’t one of those. This kind of p-zombie is different from what David Chalmers describes in The Consciousness Mind. In Chalmers view, p-zombies are physiologically identical to humans, even…
J. Dmitri Gallow discusses the principles of instrumental convergence and divergence in AI. The orthogonality thesis, which states intelligence and desire are independent, and the instrumental convergence thesis, which suggests intelligent beings will have similar instrumental desires, are critical concepts. Gallow’s argument focuses on the instrumental divergence, which emerges from the complexity and unpredictability of AI’s actions based on its desires.
This interview was conducted in 2012 in San Francisco. In the future may will see it is not ethically responsible to play genetic roulette and instead take the decision to have happy, healthy, pro-social offspring. 0:00 Introduction0:36 Alleviating Suffering 7:00 Justified Suffering? 13:12 Buddhism 14:42 The World Transhumanist Association 22:35 Recalibration of Society or Biology?…
The worry that AI could do a lot of harm I think is justified. The idea that people’s perception of morality affects their behavior sounds reasonable to me. It focuses on a study showing that when individuals are prompted to view moral issues as objective facts (a stance called moral realism), they tend to act…
The following is an enlightening session with James Hughes, Associate Provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), we delve into the intricate world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its profound economic implications. In this interview, Hughes, a renowned expert in the field, sheds…
David Quarel, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University, is deeply involved in the field of AI, specifically focusing on AI safety and reinforcement learning. He works under the guidance of Marcus Hutter and is currently engaged in studying Hutter’s Universal AI model. This model is an ambitious attempt to define intelligence through the…
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…
