There are a few possible claims mixed up here:
- Possible claim 1: "We want people in academia to be doing lots of good AGI-x-risk-mitigating research." Yes, I don't think this is controversial.
- Possible claim 2: "We should stop giving independent researchers and nonprofits money to do AGI-x-risk-mitigating research, because academia is better." You didn't exactly say this, but sorta imply it. I disagree. Academia has strengths and weaknesses, and certain types of projects and people might or might not be suited to academia, and I think we shouldn't make a priori blanket declarations about academia being appropriate for everything versus nothing. My wish-list of AGI safety research projects (blog post is forthcoming UPDATE: here it is) has a bunch of items that are clearly well-suited to academia and a bunch of others that are equally clearly a terrible fit to academia. Likewise, some people who might work on AGI safety are in a great position to do so within academia (e.g. because they're already faculty) and some are in a terrible position to do so within academia (e.g. because they lack relevant credentials). Let's just have everyone do what makes sense for them!
- Possible claim 3: "We should do field-building to make good AGI-x-risk-mitigating research more common, and better, within academia." The goal seems uncontroversially good. Whether any specific plan will accomplish that goal is a different question. For example, a proposal to fund a particular project led by such-and-such professor (say, Jacob Steinhardt or Stuart Russell) is very different from a proposal to endow a university professorship in AGI safety. In the latter case, I would suspect that universities will happily take the money and spend it on whatever their professors would have been doing anyway, and they'll just shoehorn the words "AGI safety" into the relevant press releases and CVs. Whereas in the former case, it's just another project, and we can evaluate it on its merits, including comparing it to possible projects done outside academia.
- Possible claim 4: "We should turn AGI safety into a paradigmatic field with well-defined widely-accepted research problems and approaches which contribute meaningfully towards x-risk reduction, and also would be legible to journals, NSF grant applications, etc." Yes that would be great (and is already true to a certain extent), but you can't just wish that into existence! Nobody wants the field to be preparadigmatic! It's preparadigmatic not by choice, but rather to the extent that we are still searching for the right paradigms.
(COI note.)
For concrete research directions in safety and several dozen project ideas, please see our paper Unsolved Problems in ML Safety: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13916
Note that some directions are less concretized than others. For example, it is easier to do work on Honest AI and Proxy Gaming than it is to do work on, say, Value Clarification.
Since this paper is dense for newcomers, I'm finishing up creating a course that will expand on these safety problems.
Thanks Dan!