The most ambitious direction I've worked on in the past few years is a theory of hierarchical agency (as mentioned in the ACS announcement). Recently, I've become worried that the inferential distance between "the median of current AI safety discourse" and "what I and my colleagues at ACS work on" has become too large. After multiple attempts to write a good introduction to hierarchical agency ended up in perpetual draft form, I decided to try something else: explain it to Claude.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the first part of our conversation.

Claude
Shall we begin? Could you start by explaining what you mean by "hierarchical agency" and why you think it's important for AI safety?

Jan
Broadly, there is a pattern in the world where you can often see agents composed of other agents. Like, corporations and their departments, states and citiziens, and [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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