Curious explorer of interesting ideas.
I try to write as if I were having a conversation with you in person.
I like Meditation, AI Safety, Collective Intelligence, Nature, and Civilization VI.
I would like to claim that my current safety beliefs are a mix between Paul Christiano's, Andrew Critch's and Def/Acc
Currently the CSO of a startup ensuring safe collective systems of AIs into the real world. (Collective Intelligence Safety or Applied Cooperative AI, whatever you want to call it.)
I also think that Yuah Noah Harari has some of the best takes on the internet.
It seems plausible animals have moral patienthood and so the scale of the problem is larger for animals whilst also having higher tractability. At the same time, you have cascading effects of economic development into better decision making. As a longtermist, this makes me very uncertain on where to focus resources. I will therefore put myself centrally to signal my high uncertainty.
I think that still makes sense under my model of a younger and less tractable field?
Experience comes partly from the field being viable for a longer period of time since there can be a lot more people who have worked in that area in the past.
The well-described steps and concrete near-term goals can be described as a lack of easy tractability?
I'm not saying that it isn't the case that the proposals in longtermism are worse today but rather that it will probably look different in 10 years? A question that pops up for me is about how great the proposals and applications were in the beginning of animal welfare as a field. I'm sure it was worse in terms of legibility of the people involved and the clarity of the plans.(If anyone has any light to shed on this, that would be great!)
Maybe there's some sort of effect where the more money and talent a field gets the better the applications get. To get there you first have to have people spend on more exploratory causes though? I feel like there should be anecdata from grantmakers on this.
I enjoyed the post and I thought the platform for collective action looked quite cool.
I also want to mention that I think tractability is just generally a really hard thing for longtermism. It's also a newer field and so on expectation I think you should just believe that the projects will look worse than in animal welfare. I don't think there's any need for psychoanalysis of the people in the space even though it has its fair share of wackos.
Great point, I did not think of the specific claim of 5% when thinking of the scale but rather whether more effort should be spent in general.
My brain basically did a motte and baily on me emotionally when it comes to this question so I appreciate you pointing that out!
It also seems like you're mostly critiquing the tractability of the claim and not the underlying scale nor neglectedness?
It kind of gives me some GPR vibes as for why it's useful to do right now and that dependent on initial results either less or more resources should be spent?
Super exciting!
I just wanted to share a random perspective here: Would it be useful to model sentience alongside consciousness itself?
If you read Daniel Dennett's book Kinds of Minds or take some of the Integrated Information Theory stuff seriously, you will arrive at this view of a field of consciousness. This view is similar to Philip Goff's or to more Eastern traditions such as Buddhism.
Also, even in theories like Global Workspace Theory, the amount of localised information at a point in time matters alongside the type of information processing that you have.
I'm not a consciousness researcher or anything, but I thought it would be interesting to share. I wish I had better links to research here and there, but if you look at Dennett, Philip Goff, IIT or Eastern views of consciousness, you will surely find some interesting stuff.
There's this idea of the truth as an asymmetric weapon; I guess my point isn't necessarily that the approach vector will be something like:
Expert discussion -> Policy change
but rather something like
Experts discussion -> Public opinion change -> Policy Change
You could say something about memetics and that it is the most understandable memes that get passed down rather than the truth, which is, to some extent, fair. I guess I'm a believer that the world can be updated based on expert opinion.
For example, I've noticed a trend in the AI Safety debate: the quality seems to get better and more nuanced over time (at least, IMO). I'm not sure what this entails for the general public's understanding of this topic but it feels like it affects the policy makers.
Yeah, I guess the crux here is to what extent we actually need public support or at least what type of public support that we need for it to become legislation?
If we can convince 80-90% of the experts, then I believe that this has cascading effects on the population, and it isn't like AI being conscious is something that is impossible to believe either.
I'm sure millions of students have had discussions about AI sentience for fun, and so it isn't like fully out of the Overton window either.
I'm curious to know if you disagree with the above or if there is another reason why you think research won't cascade to public opinion? Any examples you could point towards?
A crux that I have here is that research that takes a while to explain is not going to inspire a popular movement.
Okay, what comes to mind for me here is quantum mechanics and how we've come up with some pretty good analogies to explain parts of it.
Do we really need to communicate the full intricacies of AI sentience to say that an AI is conscious? I guess that this isn't the case.
The world where EA research and advocacy for AI welfare is most crucial is one where the reasons to think that AI systems are conscious are non-obvious, such that we require research to discover them, and require advocacy to convince the broader public of them.
But I think that world where this is true, and the advocacy succeeds, is a pretty unlikely one.
I think this is creating a potential false dichotomy?
Here's what I believe might happen in AI Sentience without any intervention as an example:
1. Consciousness is IIT (Integrated Information Theory) or GWT (Global Workspace Theory) based in some way or another. In other words, we have some sort of underlying field of sentience like the electromagnetic field and when parts of the field interact in specific ways then "consciousness" appears as a point load in that field.
2. Consciousness is then only verifiable if this field has consequences on the other fields of reality; otherwise, it is non-popperian, like the Multiverse theory.
3. Number 2 is really hard to prove and so we're left with very correlational evidence. It is also tightly connected to what we think of as metaphysics, meaning that we're going to be quite confused about it.
4. Therefore, general legislators and researchers leave this up to chance and do not compute any complete metrics, as it is too difficult a problem. They hope that AIs don't have sentience.
In this world, adding some AI sentience research from the EA Direction could have the consequences of:
1. Making AI labs have consciousness researchers on board so that they don't torture billions of iterations of the same AI.
2. Make governments create consciousness legislation and think tanks for the rights of AI.
3. Create technical benchmarks and theories about what is deemed to be conscious (See this initial, really good report for example)
You don't have to convince the general public; you have to convince the major stakeholders of tests that check for AI consciousness. It honestly seems kind of similar to what we have done for the safety of AI models but instead for the consciousness of them?
I'm quite excited for this week as it is a topic I'm very interested in but something that I also feel that I can't really talk about that much or take seriously as it is a bit fringe so thank you for having it!
Thanks! That post adresses what I was pointing at a lot better than I did in mine.
I can see from your response that I didn't get across my point as well as I wanted to but I appreciate the answer none the less!
It was more a question of what leads to the better long-term consequences rather than combining them.