Earlier today, Will MacAskill stepped down from the board of Effective Ventures UK[1], having served as a trustee since its founding more than a decade ago.

Will has been intending to step down for several months and announced his intention to do so earlier this year. Will had initially planned to remain on the board until we brought on additional trustees to replace him. However, given that our trustee recruitment process has taken longer than anticipated, and given also that Will continues to be recused from a significant proportion of board business[2], he felt that it didn’t make sense for him to stay on any longer.

Will announced his resignation today.

As a founding board member of EV UK (then called CEA), Will played a vital role in getting EV and its constituent projects off the ground, including co-founding Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. We are very grateful [...]

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tl;dr: Advocacy to the public is a large and neglected opportunity to advance AI Safety. AI Safety as a field is unfamiliar with advocacy, and it has reservations, some founded and others not. A deeper understanding of the dynamics of social change reveals the promise of pursuing outside game strategies to complement the already strong inside game strategies. I support an indefinite global Pause on frontier AI and I explain why Pause AI is a good message for advocacy. Because I’m American and focused on US advocacy, I will mostly be drawing on examples from the US. Please bear in mind, though, that for Pause to be a true solution it will have to be global.

The case for advocacy in general

Advocacy can work

I’ve encountered many EAs who are skeptical about the role of advocacy in social change. While it is difficult to prove causality in social phenomena like this [...]

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Outline:

(00:46) The case for advocacy in general

(00:50) Advocacy can work

(02:32) We can now talk to the public about AI risk

(03:22) What having the public's support gets us

(05:17) Social change works best inside and outside the system

(09:31) Pros and potential pitfalls of advocacy

(09:35) Other pros of advocacy

(11:11) Misconceptions about advocacy

(13:23) Downsides to advocacy

(14:26) Downside risks of continuing the status quo

(15:59) The case for advocating AI Pause

(16:31) Pros and pitfalls of AI Pause

(21:09) How AI Pause advocacy can effect change

(24:01) Audience questions

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In March of this year, 30,000 people, including leading AI figures like Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, signed a letter calling on AI labs to pause the training of AI systems. While it seems unlikely that this letter will succeed in pausing the development of AI, it did draw substantial attention to slowing AI as a strategy for reducing existential risk.

While initial work has been done on this topic (this sequence links to some relevant work), many areas of uncertainty remain. I’ve asked a group of participants to discuss and debate various aspects of the value of advocating for a pause on the development of AI on the EA Forum, in a format loosely inspired by Cato Unbound.

• On September 16, we will launch with three posts: 
  • David Manheim will share a post giving an overview of what a pause would include, how a pause would work, and some possible concrete steps [...]

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I don't have much time to get into this, but I heard rumblings, saw a post, and wrote a comment, and now I'm making a post of my own because this information feels worth spreading now. I will not be going into much more details, for reasons that should be obvious.

For those that don't know me, I'm a therapist who has been working in the community for about 5 years now, and has been almost exclusively working with the community since early 2020, though I've been scaling down my therapy practice to focus on other projects like therapist recruitment/supervision, and mental health research. I also do mediation now and then, and in both situations, Community Health has been incredibly helpful.

Another of my major things is teaching at various rationality camps and workshops for high-school age students, as well as some for adults. To say that Community Health has been valuable [...]

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Personal opinion only. Inspired by filling out the Meta coordination forum survey.

Epistemic status: Very uncertain, rough speculation. I’d be keen to see more public discussion on this question

One open question about the EA community is it's relationship to AI safety (see e.g. MacAskill). I think the relationship EA and AI safety (+ GHD & animal welfare) previously looked something like this (up until 2022ish):

With the growth of AI safety, I think the field now looks something like this:

It's an open question whether the EA Community should further grow the AI safety field, or whether the EA Community should become a distinct field from AI safety. I think my preferred approach is something like: EA and AI safety grow into new fields rather than into eachother:

• AI safety grows in AI/ML communities
• EA grows in other specific causes, as well as an “EA-qua-EA” movement.

As an ideal state, I could imagine the EA [...]

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Personal opinion only. Inspired by filling out the Meta coordination forum survey.

Epistemic status: Very uncertain, rough speculation. I’d be keen to see more public discussion on this question

One open question about the EA community is it's relationship to AI safety (see e.g. MacAskill). I think the relationship EA and AI safety (+ GHD & animal welfare) previously looked something like this (up until 2022ish):[1]

With the growth of AI safety, I think the field now looks something like this:

It's an open question whether the EA Community should further grow the AI safety field, or whether the EA Community should become a distinct field from AI safety. I think my preferred approach is something like: EA and AI safety grow into new fields rather than into eachother:

• AI safety grows in AI/ML communities
• EA grows in other specific causes, as well as an “EA-qua-EA” [...]

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When talking to newcomers to the field of biosecurity, I often felt annoyed that there wasn't a single introductory resource I could point them to that gives an overview of all the biosecurity-relevant organizations, upskilling opportunities, and funders.

With the help of a lot of contributors, I started this Google doc to provide such a resource. I'm sure that we missed some relevant organizations, and it'd be lovely if some people were to comment on the doc with additional information!

I'll copy the current version below, but please check out the link to the doc if you want to comment and see the most up-to-date version in the future!

Contributors: Max Görlitz, Simon Grimm, Andreas Prenner, Jasper Götting, Anemone Franz, Eva Siegmann, & more

Introduction

I would like to see something like aisafety.world for biosecurity. There already exists the Map of Biosecurity Interventions, but I want one for organizations!

This is a work-in-progress attempt to [...]

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Outline:

(01:25) Policy

(01:28) Think tanks

(01:31) Europe

(04:30) USA

(07:11) (Inter)governmental actors

(07:15) USA

(08:25) Europe

(09:21) International actors

(11:49) Technical RandD

(12:26) GCBR-focused non-profits

(14:06) Relevant for-profits

(14:27) Academic labs

(14:31) Upskilling (fellowships)

(14:35) Focused on newcomers

(15:44) E-learning resources

(16:42) Focused on people with some experience

(20:32) Funders of work on biorisk mitigation

(20:36) Major funders explicitly focused on catastrophic biorisk

(22:17) Smaller funders with some part of their portfolio dedicated to catastrophic biorisk

(23:33) Funders that are focused on pandemic preparedness more broadly

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https://bit.ly/biosecurity-map

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In March of this year, 30,000 people, including leading AI figures like Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, signed a letter calling on AI labs to pause the training of AI systems. While it seems unlikely that this letter will succeed in pausing the development of AI, it did draw substantial attention to slowing AI as a strategy for reducing existential risk.

While initial work has been done on this topic (this sequence links to some relevant work), many areas of uncertainty remain. I’ve asked a group of participants to discuss and debate various aspects of the value of advocating for a pause on the development of AI on the EA Forum, in a format loosely inspired by Cato Unbound.

• On September 16, we will launch with three posts: 
  • David Manheim will share a post giving an overview of what a pause would include, how a pause would work, and some possible concrete steps [...]

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Should we lobby governments to impose a moratorium on AI research? Since we don’t enforce pauses on most new technologies, I hope the reader will grant that the burden of proof is on those who advocate for such a moratorium. We should only advocate for such heavy-handed government action if it's clear that the benefits of doing so would significantly outweigh the costs.[1] In this essay, I’ll argue an AI pause would increase the risk of catastrophically bad outcomes, in at least three different ways:

1. Reducing the quality of AI alignment research by forcing researchers to exclusively test ideas on models like GPT-4 or weaker.
2. Increasing the chance of a “fast takeoff” in which one or a handful of AIs rapidly and discontinuously become more capable, concentrating immense power in their hands.
3. Pushing capabilities research underground, and to countries with looser regulations and safety requirements.

Along the way, I’ll introduce an argument for optimism [...]

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Outline:

(01:09) Feedback loops are at the core of alignment

(01:54) Alignment and robustness are often in tension

(03:21) Alignment is doing pretty well

(04:30) Alignment research was pretty bad during the last “pause”

(06:31) Fast takeoff has a really bad feedback loop

(08:43) Slow takeoff is the default (so don’t mess it up with a pause)

(09:25) Alignment optimism: AIs are white boxes

(09:49) Human and animal alignment is black box

(11:41) Status quo AI alignment methods are white box

(13:25) White box alignment in nature

(15:35) Realistic AI pauses would be counterproductive

(15:56) Realistic pauses are not international

(18:19) Realistic pauses don’t include hardware

(19:23) Hardware overhang is likely

(20:58) Likely consequences of a realistic pause

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I’m Catherine, and I'm one of the Community Liaisons working in CEA's Community Health and Special Projects Team. This is a personal post about my career.

I’m somewhat to the right of the main age peak of the EA community😬 .So I’ve had a lot of time to make mistakes sub-optimal choices in my career. It has been a long and odd road from my childhood/teenage dream jobs (train driver, Department of Conservation ranger, vet and then physicist) to where I am now.

Before I got into EA

Fluke 1: Born into immense privilege by global standards (and reasonable privilege by rich country standards)

Mistake 1:  Not doing something with that privilege. I wish someone (maybe me?) sat me down and said (maybe a more polite version of)“You know which part of the bell curve you’re [...]

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Outline:

(00:47) Before I got into EA

(00:51) Fluke 1: Born into immense privilege by global standards (and reasonable privilege by rich country standards)

(01:00) Mistake 1:  Not doing something with that privilege. I wish someone (maybe me?) sat me down and said (maybe a more polite version of)“You know which part of the bell curve you’re on. Try doing something more useful for the world!”.

(01:44) Good call 1: I talked to other students in the research group before choosing a PhD supervisor

(02:08) Mistake 2: Mistaking my interest in the ideas with interest in the day to day work

(02:28) Mistake 3: Not giving up sooner

(03:13) Mistake 4: Not exploring more options (even though they were scary)

(03:29) Good Call 2: Got really good at a valuable(ish) thing, and then used that as leverage to branch out a little

(04:12) After learning about EA

(04:21) Good call 3: I didn’t let my age put me off changing careers

(04:59) Good call 4: I reliably did stuff that seemed to need doing, even if they were boring, low status, or unpaid. I tried to be of service to others.

(06:09) Mistake 5: Thought too narrowly about my absolute advantage and didnt consider where my largest impact was.

(07:44) Good Call 5: I took a scary step - quitting my secure job without another guaranteed paid opportunity lined up (but with runway and a plan Z).

(08:19) Mistake 6: Not giving up sooner (again)

(08:44) Mistake 7: Over updating on a few rejections

(09:55) Fluke 2: Stumbling into a role at the Groups team at CEA

(10:22) Good call 6 (the best call): Doing what people I trusted thought would be most valuable

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