AI Safety at EAGlobal2017 Conference

Key Takeaways

this weekend I went to Imperial College London to attend the effective altruism global conference the conference isn't actually about AI it's about charity the idea is like if you want to save human lives and you've got a hundred pounds to spend on that you have to make a decision about which charity to give that money to and they'll all say that they're good but which charity is going to save the most lives per pound on average it's a difficult question to answer but it turns out that there are popular charities trying to solve the same problem where one charity is a hundred or a thousand times more effective than the other it's kind of insane but it can happen because apart from these guys nobody's really paying attention you know people don't really do the work to figure out which charities are actually effective or what they're trying to do so that's pretty interesting but it's not why I attended see there's an argument that if people like me are right about artificial intelligence then giving money to help fund AI safety research might actually be an effective way to use charitable donations to help the world not everybody agrees of course but they take the issue seriously enough that they invited a bunch of experts to speak at the conference to help people understand the issue better so this charity conference turns out to be a great place to hear the perspectives of a lot of AI safety experts Victoria Krakov nur from deep mind safety team and a wine Evans from the future of humanity Institute gave a talk together about careers in technical AI safety research which is basically what this channel is about I'm not going to include much from these talks because they were professionally recorded and they'll go live on YouTube at some point I'll put a link in the description as in when that happens but yeah Vica talked about what the problems are what the field involves and what it's like to work in AI safety and a wine talked about the places you can go the things you should do you know what things you'll need to study what qualifications you might need or not need if the case may be they answered questions afterwards the sound I recorded for this really sucks but yeah the general consensus was there are lots of interesting problems and hardly anyone's working on them and we need at least 10 times as many AI safety researchers as we've got deepmind is hiring the future of humanity Institute is hiring actually there will be a link in the description to a specific job posting that they have right and a wine is working on a new thing called org which is an up yet but we'll be hiring soon lots of opportunities here o some people were there out doing that if animals can experience suffering in a way that's morally relevant then maybe factory farming is actually the biggest cause of preventable suffering and death on earth and fixing that would be an effective way to use our charity money so I tried out their virtual reality thing that lets you experience the inside of a slaughterhouse from the perspective of a cow worst we are experience of my life seven point eight out of ten Helen toner an analyst at the open philanthropy project talked about their work on artificial intelligence analyzing how likely different scenarios are and thinking about strategy and policy you know how we can tackle this problem as a civilization and how they're helping to fund the technical research that we'll need in the questions she had some advice about talking to people about this subject and about doing the work yourself here's Alan Defoe also from the open philanthropy project who went into some detail about their analysis of the landscape for AI in the coming years I really recommend this talk to help people understand the difference between when people are trying to tell interesting stories about what might happen in the future and when people are seriously and diligently trying to figure out what might happen in the future because they want to be ready for it some really interesting things in that talk and I'd strongly recommend checking that out when it goes up online probably my favorite talk was from shahara VIN from the Center for the Study of existential risk at the University of Cambridge he was there talking about a report that they're going to release very soon about preventing and mitigating the misuse of artificial intelligence really interesting stuff dr. Levine is very wise and correct about everything to consume it in a more video engaging way what miles has that's all for now the next video will be the next section of concrete problems in AI safety scalable supervision so subscribe and click the bell if you want to be notified when that comes out and I'll see you next time shoes is cashews everywhere this is a great conference I want to thank my wonderful patrons who made this channel possible by supporting me on patreon all of these excellent people in this video I'm especially thanking Kyle Scott who's done more for this channel than just about anyone else you guys should see some big improvements to the channel over the coming months and a lot of that is down to Kyle so thank you so so much okay well there's cashews here this is a great conference