Program Associate at Open Philanthropy and chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I spend half my time on AI and half my time on EA community-building. Any views I express on the forum are my own, not the views of my employer.
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There's no set maximum; we expect to be limited by the number of applications that seem sufficiently promising, not the cost.
Yeah, FWIW I haven't found any recent claims about insect comparisons particularly rigorous.
Nope, sorry. :) I live to disappoint.
FWIW I had a similar initial reaction to Sophia, though reading more carefully I totally agree that it's more reasonable to interpret your comment as a reaction to the newsletter rather than to the proposal. I'd maybe add an edit to your high-level comment just to make sure people don't get confused?
Really appreciate the clarifications! I think I was interpreting "humanity loses control of the future" in a weirdly temporally narrow sense that makes it all about outcomes, i.e. where "humanity" refers to present-day humans, rather than humans at any given time period. I totally agree that future humans may have less freedom to choose the outcome in a way that's not a consequence of alignment issues.
I also agree value drift hasn't historically driven long-run social change, though I kind of do think it will going forward, as humanity has more power to shape its environment at will.
And Paul Christiano agrees with me. Truly, time makes fools of us all.
Wow, I just learned that Robin Hanson has written about this, because obviously, and he agrees with you.
Do you have the intuition that absent further technological development, human values would drift arbitrarily far? It's not clear to me that they would-- in that sense, I do feel like we're "losing control" in that even non-extinction AI is enabling a new set of possibilities that modern-day humans would endorse much less than the decisions of future humans otherwise. (It does also feel like we're missing the opportunity to "take control" and enable a new set of possibilities that we would endorse much more.)
Relatedly, it doesn't feel to me like the values of humans 150,000 years ago and humans now and even ems in Age of Em are all that different on some more absolute scale.
I think we probably will seek out funding from larger institutional funders if our funding gap persists. We actually just applied for a ~$1M grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund.
Changed, thanks for the suggestion!