I asked the Constellation Slack channel how the technical AIS landscape has changed since I last spent substantial time in the Bay Area (September 2023), and I figured it would be useful to post this (with the permission of the contributors to either post with or without...
I haven't shared this post with other relevant parties – my experience has been that private discussion of this sort of thing is more paralyzing than helpful. I might change my mind in the resulting discussion, but, I prefer that discussion to be public.
I think 80...
I'm often asked about how the existential risk landscape has changed in the years since I wrote The Precipice. Earlier this year, I gave a talk on exactly that, and I want to share it here.
Here's a video of the talk and a full transcript.
In the years since I wrote...
That's an odd prior. I can see a case for a prior that gets you to <10^-6, maybe even 10^-9, but how can you get to substantially below 10^-9 annual with just historical data???
Sapiens hasn't been around for that long for longer than a million years! (and conflict with homo sapiens or other human subtypes still seems like a plausible reason for extinction of other human subtypes to me). There have only been maybe 4 billion species total in all of geological history! Even if you have almost certainty that literally no species has ever died of conflict, y...
I can highly recommend following Sentinel's weekly minutes, a weekly update from superforecasters on the likelihood of any events which plausibly could cause worldwide catastrophe.
Perhaps the weekly newsletter I look the most forward to at this point. Read previous issues...
Good question, not sure how I get it into my email actually, I can't find it on the website either
edit: I think it's through the forecasting newsletter
Hi all, This text is meant for a general audience (people who don't know much about AI risk or Cybersecurity) to help them understand concrete risks of AI, and how legislation could help.
I'd like this to be something you could send to your cousin/friend who is interested in politics but doesn't really care about AI risk, and have them "get it."
To that effect, would love feedback on understandability, other useful points, and fact-checking, as I'm still learning about this topic.
Threat Scenario 1: Cyberterrorism
In 2026, a European ecoterrorist group will decide to take down Texas’s energy grid as punishment for the US’s failure to uphold climate commitments. They decide to leverage an open source AI model, like Meta’s Llama, to infiltrate the grid. The model has been trained to refuse...
Anthropic issues questionable letter on SB 1047 (Axios). I can't find a copy of the original letter online.
I like the hybrid approach, and discuss its implications for replaceability a bit here. (Shifting to the intrapersonal case: those of us who reject preference theories of well-being may still recognize reasons not to manipulate preferences, for example based on personal identity: the more you manipulate my values, the less the future person is me. To be a prudential benefit, then, the welfare gain has to outweigh the degree of identity loss. Moreover, it's plausible that extrinsic manipulations are typically more disruptive to one's degree of psychological... (read more)