The Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR) will be running its second-ever intro fellowship on risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks), intended for effective altruists to learn more about which s-risks we consider most important and how to reduce them.
Logistics
The fellowship is six weeks long and involves a time commitment of about 3-5 hours per week. It will likely take place from early January to February. The exact dates will be chosen based on the participants’ availability.
The fellowship will cover what we currently consider to be the most important sources of s-risk (TAI conflict, risks from malevolent actors).
Fellowship participants will be divided into small cohorts. Each week will cover a new topic. Participants will explore relevant background materials in their own time, and then have the opportunity to discuss the topic with each other and with CLR staff during a one-hour Zoom meeting. For the final week, each cohort will choose from a list of preselected topics to learn about, giving participants the ability to tailor the material in a way that’s most useful for them.
In addition to having group discussions, participants will attend talks by s-risk researchers and be given the option to schedule 1-1 personalized career calls with us. CLR researchers will also join fellowship meetings about topics related to their work, to answer questions and help facilitate discussion.
Target Audience
We think this event will be useful for you if:
- You are interested in s-risks and are open to making this cause a priority for your career; and
- You have not interacted extensively with CLR (staff) yet, e.g., you have talked with us for less than 10 hours.
If you’re interested in applying for our Summer Research Fellowship in the future, this fellowship is a good opportunity to learn more about our work and improve your application due to having a better understanding of what we do and how to contribute.
There might be more idiosyncratic reasons to apply and the criteria above are intended as a guide rather than strict criteria.
Application details
You can apply to participate in the fellowship by filling out this form. The deadline is December 7, 2023, at 23:59 p.m Pacific Time. In some cases, we might ask applicants to do a short interview (10-15 minutes).
We expect to make final application decisions by December 21, 2023.
If you have any questions about the program or are uncertain whether to apply, you can comment on this post, or reach out to tristan.cook@longtermrisk.org.
Any reason CLR believes that to be the case specifically? For instance, it's argued on this page that botched alignment attempts/partially aligned AIs (near miss) & unforeseen instrumental drives of an unaligned AI are the 2 likeliest AGI-related s-risks, with malevolent actors (deliberately suffering-aligned AI) currently a lesser concern. I guess TAI conflict could fall under the second category, as an instrumental goal derived risk.
Thanks for asking — you can read more about these two sources of s-risk in Section 3.2 of our new intro to s-risks article. (We also discuss "near miss" there, but our current best guess is that such scenarios are significantly less likely than other s-risks of comparable scale.)