All of ZacRichardson's Comments + Replies

This is a really excellent summary/state of play for IIDM. Thanks for writing this up!

What do you think is the most important role people without technical/quantitative educational backgrounds can play in AI safety/governance?

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bgarfinkel
4y
I don't have a single top pick; I think this will generally depend on a person's particular interests, skills, and "career capital." I do just want to say, though, that I don't think it's at all necessary to have a strong technical background to do useful AI governance work. For example, if I remember correctly, most of the research topics discussed in the "AI Politics" and "AI Ideal Governance" sections of Allan Dafoe's research agenda don't require a significant technical background. A substantial portion of people doing AI policy/governance/ethics research today also have a primarily social science or humanities background. Just as one example that's salient to me, because I was a co-author on it, I don't think anything in this long report on distributing the benefits of AI required substantial technical knowledge or skills. (That being said, I do think it's really important for pretty much anyone in the AI governance space to understand at least the core concepts of machine learning. For example, it's important to know things like the difference between "supervised" and "unsupervised" learning, the idea of stochastic gradient descent, the idea of an "adversarial example," and so on. Fortunately, I think this is pretty do-able even without a STEM background; it's mostly the concepts, rather than the math, that are important. Certain kinds of research or policy work certainly do require more in-depth knowledge, but a lot of useful work doesn't.)