Formerly Ollie Base (until August 2025)
This resonates with me, thanks for sharing.
I suspect you're a lot less alone on this one than you are with donating to effective charities and were being early to COVID. (I also suspect you agree, but spelling this out for other readers).
It's tricky to get meaningful information from surveys, but this one from June finds that a slight majority of respondents thought a superintelligence would seek to take control of humanity. AI existential risk awareness is also steadily climbing, this survey says up to 34%. I would bet that still only a very small % of people are as worried as you and me and many in this community, but lots of people are somewhat worried and could probably quite quickly get more worried and be activated to do something about it.
I think this points to saying what we're worried about, and saying it clearly (like this!), especially how quickly loss of control risks are becoming very real. I'm very bullish on AI safety comms, and expect there's lots we can do there.
I just stumbled on this post. The recent OpenAI<>Hugging Face incident (and wave of related security incidents) seem to be what this post described ("a non-existential public display of misalignment").
It seems like lots of people in the AIS community were responsive to these incidents, but we might be in an even better position now if more people read this post. Thanks, keep posting!
Visions is one my favourites:
Visions
Trying to make sense of the now
Trying to make sense of the past
To show us how
Visions
Imagining the worlds that could be
Shaping a mosaic of fates
For all sentient beingsVisions
Cycles of growth and decay
Cascading chains of events
With no one to praise or blameVisions
Avoidable suffering and pain
We are patiently inching our way
Toward unreachable utopiasVisions
Enslaved by the forces of nature
Elevated by mindless replicators
Challenged to steer our collective destinyVisions
Look at the magic of reality
While accepting with all honesty
That we can't know for sure what's next
No we can't know for sure what's next
But that we're in this together
We are here togetherWe are here together
Ooh, we are here together
Oh, we are here together
We are here together
Jose Gonzalez' last two albums are wonderful and have significant (and explicit) EA influences. He'll be promoting the GWWC pledge on his upcoming tour too!
Thanks Jan, I appreciate the pushback.
Just wanted to flag the group is heavily selected for belief alignment with something like "EA/Constellation/Trajan House" views
As an event focused on x-risk, yes, I think this is fair.
"AI enabled human takeovers" was promoted as agenda to prioritize in multiple widely read memos by high statues people in the community (which the organisers prioritized in the reading list).
It's true that:
But I don’t think attendees were as strongly influenced as you seem to imply:
I do think you're pointing to a real effect to be aware of, and thanks for pointing it out, but I don't think it's as significant as you make out (though maybe you don't think it's super significant).
Results are framed as "leaders and key thinkers in the x-risk and AI safety communities agree"
I think the areas of broad consensus accurately (if roughly) reflect the data we have here and what we saw in memos. FWIW, my overall takeaway from running this survey is that leaders and key thinkers have a wide range of views and I think this post captures and conveys this.
I take "AGI goes well" to imply a wealthy and technologically advanced society. I think that could mean:
- Very cheap and delicious meat alternatives.
- Factory farming waning as it reaches inefficiencies and bottlenecks, not able to compete with the above.
- More demand for higher-welfare options like free-range and local produce.
But it also seems possible that we "lock in" factory farming and scale it further and that AGI adopts speciesist views.
Very uncertain, I don't find myself strongly disagreeing with claims across the spectrum.
FYI this is currently called "Untitled Draft" :)