Nick Beckstead – The Importance of the Far Future
Nick Beckstead is the author of the influential paper ‘On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future‘.
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Indirect Alignment
Since I’ve discussed ‘indirect alignment’ between AI and humans elsewhere, I thought I’d dedicate specific writing to this topic. It’s important to get AI alignment right because intelligence is powerful, and we are heading towards superintelligence fast. AI safety hinges not just on what an AI can do, but on what it ought to do,…
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Robin Hanson & James Hughes – Futarchy vs Plutarchy: Vote on Values, or Pay to Play?
Who gets to decide what happens next? – and by what mechanisms? Economist Robin Hanson argues that many of today’s failures are downstream of “pretty broken systems of governance”, and that we’ve “hardly tried” most plausible alternatives. His proposal, futarchy, separates values from beliefs: elected leaders define measurable national wellbeing goals, while prediction markets help…
AI Values: Satiable vs Insatiable
In short: Satiable values have diminishing returns with more resources, while insatiable values always want more, potentially leading to risky AI behaviour – it seems likely that AI with insatiable values could make existential trades, like gambling the world for a chance to double resources. Therefore potentially design AI with satiable values to ensure stability,…
Orthogonality Is Not a Forecast
Orthogonality defeats automatic moral convergence – but it does not, by itself, establish alien-value likelihood. The serious work lies in the bridge premises. The orthogonality thesis shows that intelligence alone gives us no guarantee of moral or human-value convergence. Claims that advanced AI values are likely to be alien require further arguments about training, selection,…
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Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Path Dependence in Consciousness Science
How our understanding of valence, qualia, and binding determines the long-term future Most people think the future will be shaped by AI or energy. Andrés Gómez Emilsson argues it will be shaped by how we define feeling. As a co-founder of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), Andrés has spent years pioneering a “topological” approach to…
Taking Morality Seriously in the Age of AI – Interview with David Enoch
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…
