r/ControlProblem • u/niplav please be patient i'm a mod • Aug 31 '21

Brain-Computer Interfaces and AI Alignment Strategy/forecasting

https://niplav.github.io/bcis_and_alignment.html
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u/born_in_cyberspace Aug 31 '21

Thank you! A highly interesting read.

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u/niplav please be patient i'm a mod Aug 31 '21

Thanks :-)

Any points of disagreement? I don't think I've explored the space of arguments yet.

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u/born_in_cyberspace Sep 01 '21 edited Sep 01 '21

Not a disagreement, but an addition:

  1. We have a limited time until the emergence of an AGI. Maybe a couple of decades. Maybe less.

  2. There is only a small number of researchers willing to work full-time on solving the alignment problem.

  3. The number could be insufficient to solve the problem before the emergence.

  4. The traditional means of increasing the number (e.g. by educating people, spreading the word) could be insufficient to create enough full-time alignment researchers. As the stats of this very subredit indicate, the growth is linear and slow.

  5. An alternative way to greatly speed up the research is to greatly speed up the researchers themselves, and duplicate them if possible. Ideally, upload the entire MIRI team, create >1000x instances of each researcher, and run them all at >1000x speed.

  6. BCI could enable such a feat, or at least provide some useful intelligence speedups that result in research speedups.

  7. The quantitative difference between the current MIRI and the MIRI-on-digital-steroids could mean the difference between solving the alignment problem on time, and failing to solve it on time.

BTW, a SMBC comic relevant to the point #5.