Why did the task fall to a bunch of kids/students?

I'm not surprised by this, my sense is that it's usually young people and outsiders who pioneer new fields. Older people are just so much more shaped by existing paradigms, and also have so much more to lose, that it outweighs the benefits of their expertise and resources.

Also 1993 to 2000 doesn't seem like that large a gap to me. Though I guess the thing I'm pointing at could also be summarized as "why hasn't someone created a new paradigm of AI safety in the last decade?" And one answer is that Paul and Chris and a few others created a half-paradigm of "ML safety", but it hasn't yet managed to show impressive enough results to fully take over. However, it did win on a memetic level amongst EAs in particular.

The task at hand might then be understood as synthesizing the original "AI safety" with "ML safety". Or, to put it a bit more poetically, it's synthesizing the rationalist approach to aligning AGI with the empiricist approach to aligning AGI.

To answer your question, it's pretty hard to think of really good examples, I think because humans are very bad at both philosophical competence and consequentialist reasoning, but here are some:

If this is true, then it should significantly update us away from the strategy "solve our current problems by becoming more philosophically competent and doing good consequentialist reasoning", right? If you are very bad at X, then all else equal you should try to solve problems using strategies that don't require you to do much X.

You might respond that there are no viable strategies for solving our current problems without applying a lot of philosophical competence and consequentialist reasoning. I think scientific competence and virtue ethics are plausibly viable alternative strategies (though the line between scientific and philosophical competence seems blurry to me, as I discuss below). But even given that we disagree on that, humanity solved many big problems in the past without using much philosophical competence and consequentialist reasoning, so it seems hard to be confident that we won't solve our current problems in other ways.

Out of your examples, the influence of economics seems most solid to me. I feel confused about whether game theory itself made nuclear war more or less likely—e.g. von Neumann was very aggressive, perhaps related to his game theory work, and maybe MAD provided an excuse to stockpile weapons? Also the Soviets didn't really have the game theory IIRC.

On the analytical philosophy front, the clearest wins seem to be cases where they transitioned from doing philosophy to doing science or math—e.g. the formalization of probability (and economics to some extent too). If this is the kind of thing you're pointing at, then I'm very much on board—that's what I think we should be doing for ethics and intelligence. Is it?

Re the AI safety stuff: it all feels a bit too early to say what its effects on the world have been (though on net I'm probably happy it has happened).

I guess this isn't an "in-depth account" but I'm also not sure why you're asking for "in-depth", i.e., why doesn't a list like this suffice?

Because I have various objections to this list (some of which are detailed above) and with such a succinct list it's hard to know which aspects of them you're defending, which arguments for their positive effects you find most compelling, etc.

I agree with this statement denotatively, and my own interests/work have generally been "driven by open-ended curiosity and a drive to uncover deep truths", but isn't this kind of motivation also what got humanity into its current mess? In other words, wasn't the main driver of AI progress this kind of curiosity (until perhaps the recent few years when it has been driven more by commercial/monetary/power incentives)?

Interestingly, I was just having a conversation with Critch about this. My contention was that, in the first few decades of the field, AI researchers were actually trying to understand cognition. The rise of deep learning (and especially the kind of deep learning driven by massive scaling) can be seen as the field putting that quest on hold in order to optimize for more legible metrics.

I don't think you should find this a fully satisfactory answer, because it's easy to "retrodict" ways that my theory was correct. But that's true of all explanations of what makes the world good at a very abstract level, including your own answer of metaphilosophical competence. (Also, we can perhaps cash my claim out in predictions, like: was a significant barrier to more researchers working on deep learning the criticism that it didn't actually provide good explanations of or insight into cognition? Without having looked it up, I suspect so.)

consistently good strategy requires a high amount of consequentialist reasoning

I don't think that's true. However I do think it requires deep curiosity about what good strategy is and how it works. It's not a coincidence that my own research on a theory of coalitional agency was in significant part inspired by strategic failures of EA and AI safety (with this post being one of the earliest building blocks I laid down). I also suspect that the full theory of coalitional agency will in fact explain how to do metaphilosophy correct, because doing good metaphilosophy is ultimately a cognitive process and can therefore be characterized by a sufficiently good theory of cognition.

Again, I don't expect you to fully believe me. But what I most want to read from you right now is an in-depth account of which the things in the world have gone or are going most right, and the ways in which you think metaphilosophical competence or consequentialist reasoning contributed to them. Without that, it's hard to trust metaphilosophy or even know what it is (though I think you've given a sketch of this in a previous reply to me at some point).

I should also try to write up the same thing, but about how virtues contributed to good things. And maybe also science, insofar as I'm trying to defend doing more science (of cognition and intelligence) in order to help fix risks caused by previous scientific progress.

In trying to reply to this comment I identified four "waves" of AI safety, and lists of the central people in each wave. Since this is socially complicated I'll only share the full list of the first wave here, and please note that this is all based on fuzzy intuitions gained via gossip and other unreliable sources.

The first wave I’ll call the “founders”; I think of them as the people who set up the early institutions and memeplexes of AI safety before around 2015. My list:

• Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Michael Vassar
• Anna Salamon
• Carl Schulman
• Scott Alexander
• Holden Karnofsky
• Nick Bostrom
• Robin Hanson
• Wei Dai
• Shane Legg
• Geoff Anders

The second wave I’ll call the “old guard”; those were the people who joined or supported the founders before around 2015. A few central examples include Paul Christiano, Chris Olah, Andrew Critch and Oliver Habryka.

Around 2014/2015 AI safety became significantly more professionalized and growth-oriented. Bostrom published Superintelligence, the Puerto Rico conference happened, OpenAI was founded, DeepMind started a safety team (though I don't recall exactly when), and EA started seriously pushing people towards AI safety. I’ll call the people who entered the field from then until around 2020 "safety scalers" (though I'm open to better names). A few central examples include Miles Brundage, Beth Barnes, John Wentworth, Rohin Shah, Dan Hendrycks and myself.

And then there’s the “newcomers” who joined in the last 5-ish years. I have a worse mental map of these people, but some who I respect are Leo Gao, Sahil, Marius Hobbhahn and Jesse Hoogland.

In this comment I expressed concern that my generation (by which I mean the "safety scalers") have kinda given up on solving alignment. But another higher-level concern is: are people from these last two waves the kinds of people who would have been capable of founding AI safety in the first place? And if not, where are those people now? Of course there's some difference in the skills required for founding a field vs pushing the field forward, but to a surprising extent I keep finding that the people who I have the most insightful conversations with are the ones who were around from the very beginning. E.g. I think Vassar is the single person doing the best thinking about the lessons we can learn about failures of AI safety over the last decade (though he's hard to interface with), and Yudkowsky is still the single person who's most able to push the Overton window towards taking alignment seriously (even though in principle many other people could have written (less doomy versions of) his Time op-ed or his recent book), Scott is still the single best blogger in the space, and so on.

Relatedly, when I talk to someone who's exceptionally thoughtful about politics (and particularly the psychological aspects of politics), a disturbingly large proportion of the time it turns out that worked at (or were somehow associated with) Leverage. This is really weird to me. Maybe I just have Leverage-aligned tastes/networks, but even so, it's a very striking effect. (Also, how come there's no young Moldbug?)

Assuming that I'm gesturing at something real, what are some possible explanations?

1. There was a unique historical period during which blogging culture was coming online, during which a bunch of ideas and people could come together. This is hard for anyone to replicate now, and so they can't "level up" in the same way.
2. This is just what it's like to be "inside" a paradigm in general. Founding it seems like a really impressive achievement that nobody can match by pushing it forward incrementally; and the founders seem brilliant because they can operate the paradigm better than anyone else. Eventually the issues with this paradigm will pile up enough that someone else can found a new paradigm.
3. The "takeover" of AI safety by EA changed the kinds of people who were attracted to it. The kinds of people who could found a movement have gone elsewhere (but where?)
4. The world produces fewer of the kinds of people who are capable of founding movements like this now (but why?)

This is all only a rough gesture at the phenomenon, and you should be wary that I'm just being pessimistic rather than identifying something important. Also it's a hard topic to talk about clearly because it's loaded with a bunch of social baggage. But I do feel pretty confused and want to figure this stuff out.

Thanks for writing this up. While I don't have much context on what specifically has gone well or badly for your team, I do feel pretty skeptical about the types of arguments you give at several points: in particular focusing on theories of change, having the most impact, comparative advantage, work paying off in 10 years, etc. I expect that this kind of reasoning itself steers people away from making important scientific contributions, which are often driven by open-ended curiosity and a drive to uncover deep truths.

(A provocative version of this claim: for the most important breakthroughs, it's nearly impossible to identify a theory of change for them in advance. Imagine Newton or Darwin trying to predict how understanding mechanics/evolution would change the world. Now imagine them trying to do that before they had even invented the theory! And finally imagine if they only considered plans that they thought would work within 10 years, and the sense of scarcity and tension that would give rise to.)

The rest of my comment isn't directly about this post, but close enough that this seems like a reasonable place to put it. EDIT: to be more clear: the rest of this comment is not primarily about Neel or "pragmatic interpretability", it's about parts of the field that I consider to be significantly less relevant to "solving alignment" than that (though work that's nominally on pragmatic interpretability could also fall into the same failure modes). I clarify my position further in this comment; thanks Rohin for the pushback.

I get the sense that there was a "generation" of AI safety researchers who have ended up with a very marginalist mindset about AI safety. Some examples:

• the evals that Beth Barnes (and maybe Dan Hendrycks?) are focusing on
• the scenarios that Daniel Kokotajlo is focusing on
• the models of misalignment that Evan Hubinger is focusing on
• the forecasting that the OpenPhil worldview investigations team focused on
• scary demos
• safety cases
• policy approaches like SB-1047

In other words, whole swathes of the field are not even aspiring to be the type of thing that could solve misalignment. In the terminology of this excellent post, they are all trying to attack a category I problem not a category II problem. Sometimes it feels like almost the entire field EDIT: most of the field is Goodharting on the subgoal of "write a really persuasive memo to send to politicians". Pragmatic interpretability feels like another step in that direction (EDIT: but still significantly more principled than the things I listed above).

This is all related to something Buck recently wrote: "I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interventions that AI companies could implement to reduce risk assuming a low budget, and about how to cause AI companies to marginally increase that budget". I'm sure Buck has thought a lot about his strategy here, and I'm sure that you've thought a lot about your strategy as laid out in this post, and so on. But a part of me is sitting here thinking: man, everyone sure seems to have given up. (And yes, I know it doesn't feel like giving up from the inside, but from my perspective that's part of the problem.)

Now, a lot of the "old guard" seems to have given up too. But they at least know what they've given up on. There was an ideal of fundamental scientific progress that MIRI and Paul and a few others were striving towards; they knew at least what it would feel like (if not what it would look like) to actually make progress towards understanding intelligence. Eliezer and various others no longer think that's plausible. I disagree. But aside from the object-level disagreement, I really want people to be aware that this is a thing that's at least possible in principle to aim for, lest the next generation of the AI safety community ends up giving up on it before they even know what they've given up on.

(I'll leave for another comment/post the question of what went wrong in my generation. The "types of arguments" I objected to above all seem quite EA-flavored, and so one salient possibility is just that the increasing prominence of EA steered my generation away from the type of mentality in which it's even possible to aim towards scientific breakthroughs. But even if that's one part of the story, I expect it's more complicated than that.)

Thinking more about the cellular automaton stuff: okay, so Game of Life is Turing complete. But the question is whether we can pin down properties that GoL has that Turing machines don't have.

I have a vague recollection that parallel Turing Machines are a thing, but this paper claims that the actual formalisms are disappointing. One nice thing about Game of Life is that the way that different programs interact internally (via game of life physics) is also how they interact with each other. Whereas any multi-tape Turing Machine (even one with clever rules about how to integrate inputs from multiple tapes) wouldn't have that property.

I feel like I'm not getting beyond the original idea that Game of Life could have adversarial robustness in a way that Turing Machines don't. But it feels like you'd need to demonstrate this with some construction that's actually adversarially robust, which seems difficult.

Someone on the EA forum asked why I've updated away from public outreach as a valuable strategy. My response:

I used to not actually believe in heavy-tailed impact. On some gut level I thought that early rationalists (and to a lesser extent EAs) had "gotten lucky" in being way more right than academic consensus about AI progress. I also implicitly believed that e.g. Thiel and Musk and so on kept getting lucky, because I didn't want to picture a world in which they were actually just skillful enough to keep succeeding (due to various psychological blockers).

Now, thanks to dealing with a bunch of those blockers, I have internalized to a much greater extent that you can actually be good not just lucky. This means that I'm no longer interested in strategies that involve recruiting a whole bunch of people and hoping something good comes out of it. Instead I am trying to target outreach precisely to the very best people, without compromising much.

Relatedly, I've updated that the very best thinkers in this space are still disproportionately the people who were around very early. The people you need to soften/moderate your message to reach (or who need social proof in order to get involved) are seldom going to be the ones who can think clearly about this stuff. And we are very bottlenecked on high-quality thinking.

(My past self needed a lot of social proof to get involved in AI safety in the first place, but I also "got lucky" in the sense of being exposed to enough world-class people that I was able to update my mental models a lot—e.g. watching the OpenAI board coup close up, various conversations with OpenAI cofounders, etc. This doesn't seem very replicable—though I'm trying to convey a bunch of the models I've gained on my blog, e.g. in this post.)

if there are sufficiently many copies, it becomes impossible to corrupt them all at once.

So I don't love this model because escaping corruption is 'too easy'.

I really like the cellular automaton model. But I don't think it makes escaping corruption easy! Even if most of the copies are non-corrupt, the question is how you can take a "vote" of the corrupt vs non-corrupt copies without making the voting mechanism itself be easily corrupted. That's why I was talking about the non-corrupt copies needing to "overpower" the corrupt copies above.

A next step is to settle on a model of what you want to get done, and what capabilities the adversaries have.

Perhaps. The issue here is that I'm not so interested in any specific goal, but rather in facilitating emergent complexity. One analogy here is designing Conway's game of life: I expect that it wasn't a process of "pick the rules you want, then see what results from those" but also in part "pick what results you want, and then see what rules lead to that".

Re the Byzantine generals problem, see my reply to niplav below:

I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that Byzantine fault tolerance mostly thinks about cases where the nodes give separate outputs—e.g. in the Byzantine generals problem, the "output" of each node is whether it attacks or retreats. But I'm interested in cases where the nodes need to end up producing a "synthesis" output—i.e. there's a single output channel under joint control.

Error-correcting codes work by running some algorithm to decode potentially-corrupted data. But what if the algorithm might also have been corrupted? One approach to dealing with this is triple modular redundancy, in which three copies of the algorithm each do the computation and take the majority vote on what the output should be. But this still creates a single point of failure—the part where the majority voting is implemented. Maybe this is fine if the corruption is random, because the voting algorithm can constitute a very small proportion of the total code. But I'm most interested in the case where the corruption happens adversarially—where the adversary would home in on the voting algorithm as the key thing to corrupt.

After a quick search, I can't find much work on this specific question. But I want to speculate on what such an "error-correcting algorithm" might look like. The idea of running many copies of it in parallel seems solid, so that it's hard to corrupt a majority at once. But there can't be a single voting algorithm (or any other kind of "overseer") between those copies and the output channel, because that overseer might itself be corrupted. Instead, you need the majority of the copies to be able to "overpower" the few corrupted copies to control the output channel via some process that isn't mediated by a small easily-corruptible section of code.

The viability of some copies "overpowering" other copies will depend heavily on the substrate on which they're running. For example, if all the copies are running on different segments of a Universal Turing Machine tape, then a corrupted copy could potentially just loop forever and prevent the others from answering. So in order to make error-correcting algorithms viable we may need a specific type of Universal Turing Machine which somehow enforces parallelism. Then you need some process by which copies that agree on their outputs can "merge" together to form a more powerful entity; and by which entities that disagree can "fight it out". At the end there should be some way for the most powerful entity to control the output channel (which isn't accessible while conflict is still ongoing).

The punchline is that we seem to have built up a kind of model of "agency" (and, indeed, almost a kind of politics) from these very basic assumptions. Perhaps there are other ways to create such error-correcting algorithms. If so, I'd be very interested in hearing about them. But I increasingly suspect that agency is a fundamental concept which will emerge in all sorts of surprising places, if only we know how to look for it.