This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job.
My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI.
...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
What is EA's stance on Gain-of-Function Research? (OC)
I recently interviewed a Columbia University parasitologist on GOF research. I picked him, in part, because he was strongly in favor of conducting GOF. According to him, the risks are minimal, and the benefits far outweigh them.
I'm not a scientist (obviously), but I can't say I agree with the entirety of his argument on the risks. Smallpox has been released from the lab 3 times, so we know that human error has allowed a deadly virus to escape from a lab and kill people.
It's pretty obvious that GOF has a lot of upsides though. Many scientists studying it are conducting this research explicitly to prevent pandemics in the future.
It doesn't seem obvious to me which route will produce the least risk.
Maybe we should send all scientists doing this kind of research into a quarantine bubble, and have them do 6 weeks on/6 weeks off shifts. Other than that, I'm out of ideas.
Clip of the interview if you're interested: