One person's worth of mental energy for AI doom aversion jobs. What should I do?

post by Lorec · 2024-08-26T01:29:01.700Z · LW · GW · 16 comments

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Hi! I'm Lorec, AKA Mack. I made this post 3 years ago:

Wanted: Foom-scared alignment research partner [LW · GW]

I met some great people, but we never got much of anywhere.

Since then, technical alignment research in general also has not gotten much of anywhere [ counterexample; other strongish counterexamples I know of include the Visible Thoughts idea and Pliny's approach, Anthropic's approach doesn't seem to have panned out ] and AI doom aversion policy [LW · GW] has become a thing.

I made a Discord a while ago for discussion of doom aversion methods. We were some of the first people [to my knowledge] talking positively about SB-1047. I consider it a failure: we were early and correct, but because we were not plugged into any network, nothing came of it.

I am indifferent to technical versus policy work except to the extent of [ the effectiveness factor over the risk factor of [technical work in general] ], versus [ the effectiveness factor over the risk factor of [policy work in general] ].

Factors I'm coming in considering important contributors to the technical versus policy weigh-in:

Pro Technical

- Can potentially have low safety risks if the researcher knows exactly what they are doing and does not use their employer's money to contribute to capabilities

- Can potentially have high safety upsides if the researcher knows exactly what they are doing and is a paranoid saint and can work without ever posting their exciting intermediate results on social media [difficulty level: impossible]

- Technical experience lends [any] policy credibility, while policy experience does not lend technical credibility

Pro Policy

- Fairly safe, for people who have a reasonable level of knowing what they are doing

- Policy jobs [from my faraway position; this might be wrong] seem likely to be more fungible [with each other] than technical jobs - resulting in less risk of being locked in to one employer whose mission I find myself disagreeing with

- I expect to have an easier time getting one of these kinds of jobs; while I consider myself decent enough at programming to be qualified for such technical alignment research as is hiring in principle, in practice I have no degree, job history, or portfolio, and am done wasting my time trying to acquire them, like, no, really, done. End of story.

Who should I talk to? What movements or orgs should I look into? Where are Things Happening the most? As stated in title, all my spoons are available for this, provided I find something that's actually high prospective impact, low prospective risk.

I appreciate your time and consideration.

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