Head of Lightcone Infrastructure. Wrote the forum software that the EA Forum is based on. Often helping the EA Forum with various issues with the forum. If something is broken on the site, it's a good chance it's my fault (Sorry!).
> Risk 1: Charities could alter, conceal, fabricate and/or destroy evidence to cover their tracks.
I do not recall this having happened with organisations aligned with effective altruism.
(FWIW, it happened with Leverage Research at multiple points in time, with active effort to remove various pieces of evidence from all available web archives. My best guess is it also happened with early CEA while I worked there, because many Leverage members worked at CEA at the time and they considered this relatively common practice. My best guess is you can find many other instances.)
Now, consider this in the context of AI. Would the extinction of shumanity by AIs be much worse than the natural generational cycle of human replacement?
I think the answer to this is "yes", because your shared genetics and culture create much more robust pointers to your values than we are likely to get with AI.
Additionally, even if that wasn't true, humans alive at present have obligations inherited from the past and relatedly obligations to the future. We have contracts and inheritance principles and various things that extend our moral circle of concern beyond just the current generation. It is not sufficient to coordinate with just the present humans, we are engaging in at least some moral trade with future generations, and trading away their influence to AI systems is also not something we have the right to do.
(Importantly, I think we have many fewer such obligations to very distant generations, since I don't think we are generally borrowing or coordinating with humans living in the far future very much).
From a more impartial standpoint, the mere fact that AI might not care about the exact same things humans do doesn’t necessarily entail a decrease in total impartial moral value—unless we’ve already decided in advance that human values are inherently more important.
Look, this sentence just really doesn't make any sense to me. From the perspective of humanity, which is composed of many humans, of course the fact that AI does not care about the same things as humans creates a strong presumption that a world optimized for those values will be worse than a world optimized for human values. Yes, current humans are also limited to what degree we successfully can delegate the fulfillment of our values to future generations, but we also just share, on-average, a huge fraction of our values with future generations. That is a struggle every generation faces, and you are just advocating for... total defeat being fine for some reason? Yes, it would be terrible if the next generation of humans suddenly did not care about almost anything I cared about, but that is very unlikely to happen, but it is quite likely to happen with AI systems.
Yeah, this.
From my perspective "caring about anything but human values" doesn't make any sense. Of course, even more specifically, "caring about anything but my own values" also doesn't make sense, but in as much as you are talking to humans, and making arguments about what other humans should do, you have to ground that in their values and so it makes sense to talk about "human values".
The AIs will not share the pointer to these values, in the same way as every individual does to their own values, and so we should a-priori assume the AI will do worse things after we transfer all the power from the humans to the AIs.
In the absence of meaningful evidence about the nature of AI civilization, what justification is there for assuming that it will have less moral value than human civilization—other than a speciesist bias?
You know these arguments! You have heard them hundreds of times. Humans care about many things. Sometimes we collapse that into caring about experience for simplicity.
AIs will probably not care about the same things, as such, the universe will be worse by our lights if controlled by AI civilizations. We don't know what exactly those things are, but the only pointer to our values that we have is ourselves, and AIs will not share those pointers.
It's been confirmed that the donation matching still applies to early employees: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HE3Styo9vpk7m8zi4/evhub-s-shortform?commentId=oeXHdxZixbc7wwqna
Given that I just got a notification for someone disagree-voting on this:
This is definitely no longer the case in the current EA Funding landscape. It used to be the case, but various changes in the memetic and political landscape have made funding gaps much stickier, and much less anti-inductive (mostly because cost-effectiveness prioritization of the big funders got a lot less comprehensive, so there is low-hanging fruit again).
I’m not making any claims about whether the thresholds above are sensible, or whether it was wise for them to be suggested when they were. I do think it seems clear with hindsight that some of them are unworkably low. But again, advocating that AI development be regulated at a certain level is not the same as predicting with certainty that it would be catastrophic not to. I often feel that taking action to mitigate low probabilities of very severe harm, otherwise known as “erring on the side of caution” somehow becomes a foreign concept in discussions of AI risk.
(On a quick skim, and from what I remember from what the people actually called for, I think basically all of these thresholds were not for banning the technology, but for things like liability regimes, and in some cases I think the thresholds mentioned are completely made up)
Yes, many of my links over the years broke, and I haven't been able to get any working copy.