TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

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TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes) episodes

March 27, 2023 [Week 3] "The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective" (Sections 2, 3 and 4) by Richard Ngo, Lawrence Chan & Sören Mindermann
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feed_id: agi_sf__alignment
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 1h00m
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Within the coming decades, artificial general intelligence (AGI) may surpass human capabilities at a wide range of important tasks. We outline a case for expecting that, without substantial effort to prevent it, AGIs could learn to pursue goals which are undesirable (i.e. misaligned) from a human perspective. We argue that if AGIs are trained in ways similar to today's most capable models, they could learn to act deceptively to receive higher reward, learn internally-represented goals which generalize beyond their training distributions, and pursue those goals using power-seeking strategies. We outline how the deployment of misaligned AGIs might irreversibly undermine human control over the world, and briefly review research directions aimed at preventing this outcome.

Original article:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626

Authors:
Richard Ngo, Lawrence Chan, Sören Mindermann

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This article is featured on the AGI Safety Fundamentals: Alignment course curriculum.

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34 min
March 27, 2023 "Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history" by Tyler Cowen
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client: t3a
feed_id: ai ai_safety
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In several of my books and many of my talks, I take great care to spell out just how special recent times have been, for most Americans at least. For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape:

1. American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans.

2. An absence of truly radical technological change.
Unless you are very old, old enough to have taken in some of WWII, or were drafted into Korea or Vietnam, probably those features describe your entire life as well.

In other words, virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history".

Now, circa 2023, at least one of those assumptions is going to unravel, namely #2. AI represents a truly major, transformational technological advance. Biomedicine might too, but for this post I’ll stick to the AI topic, as I wish to consider existential risk.

Original article:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/existential-risk-and-the-turn-in-human-history.html

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1 min
March 22, 2023 "How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role" by Elliott Thornley and Carl Shulman
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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai ai_safety ai_safety__governance
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 7h00m
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Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DiGL5FuLgWActPBsf/how-much-should-governments-pay-to-prevent-catastrophes

Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.

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1 hr 17 min
March 21, 2023 "Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children" by Matt Reynolds
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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h45m
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Oral rehydration therapy is now the standard treatment for dehydration. It’s saved millions of lives, and can be prepared at home in minutes. So why did it take so long to discover?

Written by Matt Reynolds for Asterisk Magazine.
Original article:
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/2/salt-sugar-water-zinc-how-scientists-learned-to-treat-the-20th-century-s-biggest-killer-of-children
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
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35 min
March 21, 2023 ""Carefully Bootstrapped Alignment" is organizationally hard" by Raemon
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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai_safety ai_safety__governance
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h30m
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In addition to technical challenges, plans to safely develop AI face lots of organizational challenges. If you're running an AI lab, you need a concrete plan for handling that.

In this post, I'll explore some of those issues, using one particular AI plan as an example. I first heard this described by Buck at EA Global London, and more recently with OpenAI's alignment plan. (I think Anthropic's plan has a fairly different ontology, although it still ultimately routes through a similar set of difficulties)

I'd call the cluster of plans similar to this "Carefully Bootstrapped Alignment."

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/thkAtqoQwN6DtaiGT/carefully-bootstrapped-alignment-is-organizationally-hard

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20 min
March 21, 2023 "More information about the dangerous capability evaluations we did with GPT-4 and Claude." by Beth Barnes
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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai, ai_safety, ai_safety__technical
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h30m
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This is a linkpost for https://evals.alignment.org/blog/2023-03-18-update-on-recent-evals/

[Written for more of a general-public audience than alignment-forum audience. We're working on a more thorough technical report.]

We believe that capable enough AI systems could pose very large risks to the world. We don’t think today’s systems are capable enough to pose these sorts of risks, but we think that this situation could change quickly and it’s important to be monitoring the risks consistently. Because of this, ARC is partnering with leading AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI as a third-party evaluator to assess potentially dangerous capabilities of today’s state-of-the-art ML models. The dangerous capability we are focusing on is the ability to autonomously gain resources and evade human oversight.

We attempt to elicit models’ capabilities in a controlled environment, with researchers in-the-loop for anything that could be dangerous, to understand what might go wrong before models are deployed. We think that future highly capable models should involve similar “red team” evaluations for dangerous capabilities before the models are deployed or scaled up, and we hope more teams building cutting-edge ML systems will adopt this approach. The testing we’ve done so far is insufficient for many reasons, but we hope that the rigor of evaluations will scale up as AI systems become more capable.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Gt42jX7RiaNaxCwP/more-information-about-the-dangerous-capability-evaluations

Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO.

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15 min
March 21, 2023 "How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person" by Erik Hoel
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client: t3a
project_id: ai_safety
feed_id: ai ai_safety
narrator: pw
qa: km
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Last week, The New York Times published the transcript of a conversation with Microsoft’s Bing (AKA Sydney) wherein over the course of a long chat the next-gen AI tried, very consistently, and without any prompting to do so, to break up the reporter’s marriage and to emotionally manipulate him in every way possible. I had been up late the night before researching reports coming out of similar phenomena as Sydney threatened and cajoled users across the globe, later arguing that same day in “I am Bing, and I am evil” that it was time to panic about AI safety. Like many, while I knew that current AIs were capable of these acts, what I didn’t expect was Microsoft to release one that was so obviously unhinged and yet, at the same time, so creepily convincing and intelligent.

Original article:
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-to-navigate-the-ai-apocalypse

Narrated for Erik Hoel by TYPE III AUDIO.
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45 min
March 14, 2023 EA Forum Weekly Summaries – Episode 20 (March 6-12, 2023)
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client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fWGdsWbS6vtC9E7ii/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-6th-12th-march-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
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23 min
March 14, 2023 "Enemies vs Malefactors" by Nate Soares
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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h15m
qa_time: 0h15m
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Status: some mix of common wisdom (that bears repeating in our particular context), and another deeper point that I mostly failed to communicate.
Short version
Harmful people often lack explicit malicious intent. It’s worth deploying your social or community defenses against them anyway. I recommend focusing less on intent and more on patterns of harm.
(Credit to my explicit articulation of this idea goes in large part to Aella, and also in part to Oliver Habryka.)
Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zidQmfFhMgwFzcHhs/enemies-vs-malefactors

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10 min
March 14, 2023 "The Parable of the King and the Random Process" by moridinamael
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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h20m
qa_time: 0h10m
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~ A Parable of Forecasting Under Model Uncertainty ~

You, the monarch, need to know when the rainy season will begin, in order to properly time the planting of the crops. You have two advisors, Pronto and Eternidad, who you trust exactly equally.

You ask them both: "When will the next heavy rain occur?"

Pronto says, "Three weeks from today."

Eternidad says, "Ten years from today."

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LzQtrHSYDafXynofq/the-parable-of-the-king-and-the-random-process#

Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO.
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11 min

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TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes) episodes