The ‘soul spec’ reads like a character + governance spec for an externally deployed assistant: what Claude should optimise for, how to resolve instruction conflicts, and what “good behaviour” means across contexts. I liked that it seemed to be a concrete example of ‘motivation selection that I have been harping on about being important –…
Adam Ford speaks with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, director of research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), about valence realism, the mathematics of consciousness, and what all this might mean for AI alignment and the long-term future of sentient life. Valence realism, as QRI uses the term, is the claim that for any given conscious state there…
David Enoch counters Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking argument (EDA), also known as the “Darwinian Dilemma,” challenges moral realism – the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human attitudes. The argument posits that natural selection has significantly shaped our moral beliefs for survival advantage, not for their accuracy in tracking independent moral facts, leading…
More precisely, Deepmind’s Gemini AI achieved gold standard (it didn’t technically win) at the International Math Olympiad. AI has made significant gains in capability over the past few years. Could AI be a better moral reasoner than us, and how would we know? This is a genuinely important question that highlights a tension in how…
“AI as a moral hypothesis generator” – with David Enoch. AI may be useful to help generate moral hypotheses using pattern recognition to find deep ethical patterns (meta-patterns) invisible to humans or hard to see – proposing new moral ideas or testing existing ones within varieties of ethical frameworks like utilitarianism or deontology, acting as…
I recently read about Critical Realism (CR), it’s interesting – I like a lot of it, though I’m not sure I fully buy the layered picture with latent causal structure at the bottom, the “actual” layer floating above that, and the “empirical” layer on top. So CR back against a certain kind of reductive physicalism…
I keep bumping into a pattern in EA spaces: people are very comfortable being ambitious about epistemology and cause prioritisation, but surprisingly pessimistic or dismissive about moral realism, or seem attracted to moral anti-realism. Moral realism often gets caricatured as spooky – as if it posits a weird substance floating outside the universe, or some…
In the high-stakes world of Artificial Intelligence research, there is perhaps no metric more contentious than p(Doom), the probability assigned to catastrophic outcomes – including human extinction -resulting from advanced AI. Remarkably, the individuals seen as best positioned to understand this risk in profound disagreement. While many of the field’s pioneers, such as Turing Award…
In a blinded Moral Turing Test, people rated GPT-4’s moral answers higher than humans’ across most measures – yet they could still tell it was AI. Are we priming the public to over-trust machine morality? Interview with Dr Eyal Aharoni, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neuroscience Georgia State University Attributions toward artificial…
Halloween special: a scary futures tier list that is spooky in theme & sobering in content. This tier list isn’t scientific, it isn’t the final say, it doesn’t exhaustively include all doomsday risks – its a bit of a gimmick, and a fun intuition pump. Anders Sandberg is a neuroscientist and futurist well known for…