Road to AI Safety Excellence (RAISE), previously named AASAA, was an initiative from toonalfrink to improve the pipeline for AI safety researchers, especially by creating an online course. See the Post-Mortem.

Note

This page is deprecated, and it will no longer be updated by the RAISE founder (unless an independent party decides to). See the updated page at http://aisafety.camp/about/

Motivation

AI safety is a small field. It has only about 100 researchers. The field is mostly talent-constrained. Given the dangers of an uncontrolled intelligence explosion, increasing the amount of AIS researchers is crucial for the long-term survival of humanity.

Within the LW community there are plenty of talented people that bear a sense of urgency about AI. They are willing to switch careers to doing research, but they are unable to get there. This is understandable: the path up to research-level understanding is lonely, arduous, long, and uncertain. It is like a pilgrimage. One has to study concepts from the papers in which they first appeared. This is not easy. Such papers are undistilled. Unless one is lucky, there is no one to provide guidance and answer questions. Then should one come out on top, there is no guarantee that the quality of their work will be sufficient for a paycheck or a useful contribution.

The field of AI safety is in an innovator phase. Innovators are highly risk-tolerant and have a large amount of agency, which allows them to survive an environment with little guidance or supporting infrastructure. Let community organisers not fall for the typical mind fallacy, expecting risk-averse people to move into AI safety all by themselves. Unless one is particularly risk-tolerant or has a perfect safety net, they will not be able to fully take the plunge. Plenty of measures can be made to make getting into AI safety more like an "It's a small world"-ride:

Let there be a tested path with signposts along the way to make progress clear and measurable.
Let there be social reinforcement so that we are not hindered but helped by our instinct for conformity.
Let there be high-quality explanations of the material to speed up and ease the learning process, so that it is cheap.

Becoming an AIS researcher in 2020

What follows is a vision of how things *could* be, should this project come to fruition.

The path

1. Tim Urban's Road to Superintelligence is a popular introduction to s...