What Even Is This Timeline

The striking thing about reading what is potentially the most important document in human history is how impossible it is to take seriously. The entire premise seems like science fiction. Not bad science fiction, but—crucially—not hard science fiction. Ted Chiang, not Greg Egan. The kind of science fiction that's fun and clever and makes you think, and doesn't tax your suspension of disbelief with overt absurdities like faster-than-light travel or humanoid aliens, but which could never actually be real.

A serious, believable AI alignment agenda would be grounded in a deep mechanistic understanding of both intelligence and human values. Its masters of mind-engineering would understand how every part of the human brain works, and how the parts fit together to comprise what their ignorant predecessors would have thought of as a person. They would see the cognitive work done by each part, and know how to write code that accomplishes the same work in purer form.

If the serious alignment agenda sounds so impossibly ambitious as to be completely intractable, well, it is. It seemed that way fifteen years ago, too. What changed is that fifteen years ago, building artificial general [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) What Even Is This Timeline

(07:32) A Bet on Generalization

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.