Rohin Shah on the State of AGI Safety Research in 2021

Rohin Shah, Research Scientist on DeepMind's technical AGI safety team, joins us to discuss: AI value alignment; how an AI Researcher might decide whether to work on AI Safety; and why we don't know that AI systems won't lead to existential risk.  Topics discussed in this episode include: - Inner Alignment versus Outer Alignment - Foundation Models - Structural AI Risks - Unipolar versus Multipolar Scenarios - The Most Important Thing That Impacts the Future of Life You can find the page for the podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2021/11/01/rohin-shah-on-the-state-of-agi-safety-research-in-2021 Watch the video version of this episode here: https://youtu.be/_5xkh-Rh6Ec Follow the Alignment Newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ Have any feedback about the podcast? You can share your thoughts here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DRBFZCT Timestamps:  0:00 Intro 00:02:22 What is AI alignment? 00:06:00 How has your perspective of this problem changed over the past year? 00:06:28 Inner Alignment 00:13:00 Ways that AI could actually lead to human extinction 00:18:53 Inner Alignment and MACE optimizers 00:20:15 Outer Alignment 00:23:12 The core problem of AI alignment 00:24:54 Learning Systems versus Planning Systems 00:28:10 AI and Existential Risk 00:32:05 The probability of AI existential risk 00:51:31 Core problems in AI alignment 00:54:46 How has AI alignment, as a field of research changed in the last year? 00:54:02 Large scale language models 00:54:50 Foundation Models 00:59:58 Why don't we know that AI systems won't totally kill us all? 01:09:05 How much of the alignment and safety problems in AI will be solved by industry? 01:14:44 Do you think about what beneficial futures look like? 01:19:31 Moral Anti-Realism and AI 01:27:25 Unipolar versus Multipolar Scenarios 01:35:33 What is the safety team at DeepMind up to? 01:35:41 What is the most important thing that impacts the future of life? This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.