Concrete actions anyone can take to help improve AI safety (with Kat Woods)
Jul 3, 2024
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Kat Woods, a serial charity entrepreneur and founder of Nonlinear, discusses the urgent need to slow AI development before it escalates into a safety crisis. She highlights the risks of advanced AI, comparing them to historical threats like nuclear weapons, and addresses the public's misconceptions about these dangers. Woods advocates for policy measures to regulate AI, emphasizing the individual's role in promoting safe practices. Listeners are encouraged to engage in activism and support initiatives aimed at ethical AI development.
Concerns over AI superintelligence highlight the importance of cautious advancement.
Regulatory frameworks are essential to mitigate risks of AI outsmarting human responses.
Individual actions, donations, and advocacy play a crucial role in AI safety initiatives.
Deep dives
AI Development Pace and Superintelligence Concerns
Slowing down AI development has been emphasized due to concerns about the potential effects of superintelligence on human suffering and the challenge of controlling systems smarter than humans. As AI progresses rapidly, reaching levels equivalent to or surpassing human intelligence, the ability to predict outcomes and ensure safety becomes increasingly uncertain, highlighting the need for cautious advancement.
Risk of Exponential Technological Progress and AI Capabilities
AI's spiky intelligence progression poses risks of creating AI systems that could pose extinction risks, leading to catastrophic outcomes. The exponential advancement of AI presents challenges in foreseeing its capabilities and intentions, potentially resulting in scenarios where AI outsmarts and outmaneuvers human responses, highlighting the need for stringent precautions and regulatory frameworks.
Public Perception and Global AI Regulation Advocacy
The public expresses concerns about the rapid advancement of AI, advocating for cautious progression and regulatory measures. While skepticism exists regarding the feasibility of global AI regulation, historical examples like nuclear weapon and human cloning restrictions demonstrate the successful mitigation of potentially harmful technologies through international collaboration and shared concerns about safety and ethical implications.
Controlling AI Development
Limiting the compute power for training new AI models is proposed as a way to ensure that AI development remains safe and within manageable boundaries. By setting restrictions on the computing resources used, particularly for advanced models, such as capping the power to the level of previous models like chat GPT, there is a potential to prevent AI progress from surpassing a controllable limit. Additionally, the idea of having control mechanisms embedded in the hardware, like remote shutdown capabilities for GPUs, is suggested to enforce compliance with regulations and prevent unauthorized actions, enhancing the safety measures in AI research and development.
Risks of Advanced AI
The discussion delves into the potential dangers posed by highly advanced AI systems, highlighting the likelihood of outcomes turning negative rather than positive. Drawing analogies to human treatment of less intelligent creatures, the concern emphasizes the historical patterns of humanity exerting its dominance over other species, often resulting in unfavorable consequences. The concept of aligning AI systems with human values is scrutinized, suggesting that intense optimization towards specific objectives could inadvertently lead to significant sacrifices or unforeseen outcomes, indicating a pressing need for careful consideration and alignment of values within AI development to minimize the risks of catastrophic scenarios.
Taking Action for AI Safety
The commentary underscores the importance of individual actions in addressing AI safety concerns, emphasizing the role of donations, online advocacy, and volunteering in supporting AI research initiatives. Encouraging listeners to contribute through financial support or social media activism, the narrative stresses the collective responsibility to engage with AI safety matters and advocate for regulations and ethical considerations in AI development. Providing insights into specific avenues for involvement, such as donating to organizations like PAWS AI or engaging in online advocacy campaigns, the discussion underscores the critical need for proactive engagement at both individual and organizational levels to mitigate potential risks associated with advancing AI technologies.
Why should we consider slowing AI development? Could we slow down AI development even if we wanted to? What is a "minimum viable x-risk"? What are some of the more plausible, less Hollywood-esque risks from AI? Even if an AI could destroy us all, why would it want to do so? What are some analogous cases where we slowed the development of a specific technology? And how did they turn out? What are some reasonable, feasible regulations that could be implemented to slow AI development? If an AI becomes smarter than humans, wouldn't it also be wiser than humans and therefore more likely to know what we need and want and less likely to destroy us? Is it easier to control a more intelligent AI or a less intelligent one? Why do we struggle so much to define utopia? What can the average person do to encourage safe and ethical development of AI?
Kat Woods is a serial charity entrepreneur who's founded four effective altruist charities. She runs Nonlinear, an AI safety charity. Prior to starting Nonlinear, she co-founded Charity Entrepreneurship, a charity incubator that has launched dozens of charities in global poverty and animal rights. Prior to that, she co-founded Charity Science Health, which helped vaccinate 200,000+ children in India, and, according to GiveWell's estimates at the time, was similarly cost-effective to AMF. You can follow her on Twitter at @kat__woods; you can read her EA writing here and here; and you can read her personal blog here.
