The last Dinner with Dinosaurs 🦕 (at least in this format)
Anders Sandberg
@anderssandberg
Academic jack-of-all-trades.
Joined September 2009
Anders Sandberg’s Tweets
I like this scheme, but I would add a seventh category of direct value change, eg. moral enhancement or modifying what gives us rewards.
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What are the six ways that technology can change our moral beliefs and practices? @spillteori and I cover this in our recent paper. Here is a quick summary with some examples. As always, there is a lot more in the full paper (available here: link.springer.com/article/10.100)
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#HumanCapabilitiesForum
on "Transhumanism and the future of humanity". Anders is Senior research fellow, Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford.
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Today is our founder 's birthday. We continue to work toward building the future he envisioned. Thank you Peter for being an inspiration to so many.
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🚨 Next week will be advertising a three year post doc to work with me and Hélène Landemore on our -funded project on AI, human rights, and democracy, in association with . Stay tuned!
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A fun leftist take by and on why TESCREAL is a conspiracy theory missing actual critique. I might not agree with their critique of the various letters in the abbreviation, but it actually has substance one can discuss.
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#HumanCapabilitiesForum Are there concept neurons in the monkey or rat hippocampus? Intuitions seem divergent here (I think there are).
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New paper with an exhaustive taxonomy of societal-scale AI risks, based on accountability:
arxiv.org/pdf/2306.06924
Extinction, injustice, and other widespread harms are considered. Additional taxonomies are needed for a more diverse and robust perspective on risk. Meanwhile,… Show more
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This is actually a profound thing. As we progress, the space of possible action grows. That means new virtues and new responsibilities.
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Stoicism teaches us to distinguish between what we can control and to accept things we cannot change.
The problem is that mining stars is clearly not forbidden by the laws of physics.
On a long enough time line, the set of things we cannot yet do will shrink to nothing.
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#HumanCapabilitiesForum Sane comment about LLMs in a discussion: "Don't worry about consciousness in such devices, let them be what they are."
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This is an excellent overview of how nontrivial making current LLMs is. Especially the instruct approach is both very important for their practical utility, and makes the relationship between them and people convoluted.
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The wisdom that "LLMs just predict text" is true, but misleading in its incompleteness.
"As an AI language model trained by OpenAI..." is an astoundingly poor prediction of what a typical human would write.
Let's resolve this contradiction — a thread:
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(Since the universe runs on irony, of course I got a paper back just now to revise where one of the tasks is reformatting it.)
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First shocking adult realisation : "everybody's winging it all the time!"
#2: "they are as dumb as me!"
#3: "it still works, somehow?"
#4: "the people who *think* they know what they are doing are really dangerous..."
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One disappointing thing you discover about the Adult World is that the minimum competence level of professionals – doctors, lawyers – is much lower than you would hope
Not a little bit lower, much lower
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We shouldn’t be against AI safety any more than we are against seat belts, fire alarms, or drug trials.
Why confronting AI risks is important even for optimists:
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Researchers having to reformat papers to fit journals estimated to cost $230 million per year.
Not sure I see that as a large problem, but it sure is annoying. It also feels like what AI might be very helpful for: can journal guidelines be adapted for AI?
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This paper seems the most underrated in terms of AI Governance:
- 50 policy suggestions
- survey responses from AGI labs, academia and civil society
- Many were widely agreed
Take the ones that get 90% agreement.
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Putting AI to work in #cryopreservation
Oxford Cryotechnology is deploying computational and machine learning technologies to improve cryopreservation methods.
#innovation #AI #digital #cryonics #longevity
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This is very cool and useful.
The real problem will be to get enough representation of different values in RLHF - both an issue of whose values get regarded as relevant and the effort to do RL - but that also suggests looking for techniques to make this cheaper may be good.
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Human-aligned AI is a multi-objective problem. Yet, current RLHF prioritizes certain values when aligning LLMs, resulting in a lack of transparency and unfair representation of minorities. In our latest paper arxiv.org/abs/2306.04488), we embrace the diversity of human values.
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Dinner with Dinosaurs lecture…. An interesting one.
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If you are working on stuff that might substantially improve the future of humanity, consider applying to Lightspeed Grants, a new funding program I just launched: lightspeedgrants.org
We are distributing $5M, applications close July 6th. Get a response in 14 days.
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That fractal braid also borders on spots no human has ever touched. And it is a safe bet that there are such spots very close to where you are right now.
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Our lives form a joint 4D braid. Several billion threads weaving around each other, with dense tangles, many recurring patterns lasting weeks, years or decades. It also has an overall 4D shape set by human presence and absence.
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Our spatial presence is a kind of fractal, with long Levy flights to remote locations and dense clusters around home, work and friends. Here and there thin threads of hikes, exploration, or driving wrong.
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Generally, if we could see where we had ever been it would make a pattern where next to the many places we had been thousands of times there are places we have never been. Obviously a few meters up in the air, but also many closets, corners, and neighbouring flats.
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Showerthought: when you check out from your hotel room it is very likely the last time in your life you will set foot there.
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I am obviously turning into a grumpy old man. Kids, stop having fun! At least so loudly. When I want to chat.
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Ok, this is beyond parody. As soon as the horrible rendition of Queen stopped a bunch of capoeira dancers showed up. At least they are easy on the eye.
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Sagrada familia is awesome, but how did Gaudi design this without computers? By using analog string and weight constructions.
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I love Barcelona, but every time I try to eat somebody starts playing music very loudly.
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Fun to feature in a recent episode of ArteTV's '42—The Answer fo Almost Everything', titled 'When will the world end?'.
I got to touch on everything from prophecy, to Rapa Nui, to the dubious, yet recurrent, idea that collapse somehow is 'built into' the civilisation it befalls..
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Ok, seems to have been officially denied. So, assuming we trust this too (I bet there will be a string of confusing clarifications next), storm in water glass. Keep moving, nothing to see here. AI drones are completely safe and nothing to worry about.
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Ok, seems to have been officially denied. So, assuming we trust this too (I bet there will be a string of confusing clarifications), storm in water glass. Keep moving, nothing to see here. AI drones are completely safe and nothing to worry about.
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It seems this story is not true... or at least there is an official claim that it is not true/mistaken. Fine, my credulous bad! But I wonder why so many people keep on replying that it is not true: dont you read the other replies?
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OK, this story is just unbelievably topical right now... and utterly an "I told you so" from the perspective AI safety community (especially the twist at the end). aerosociety.com/news/highlight
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Thinking about this kind of messiness is healthy and I hope makes one a bit of a better person. It also clashes with the often too glib Pride flagwaving we also want to do: we need heroes and uplifting stories of integrity.
Reality is complex: that takes real courage to face.
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The actual reality seems to have been a tangled mess. old.math.nsc.ru/LBRT/g2/englis The slap may well have been a smart if ugly move to protect oneself by attacking the enemy-at-large. Alexandrov may have had Stalin's ear. Oppression taints even the people we want to be heroes.
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Before that in 1936, there had been denunciations of Luzin and an attempted purge. Claims have been made that Alexandrov and Kolmogorov had been forced to witness in order to not be exposed as gay.
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The Luzin affair is such a case. The "fun" version is that Luzin blocked Alexandrov from becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences saying something about not electing wives, Kolmogorov slapped him, Stalin was amused but ignored it. telecom-paris.hal.science/hal-03718689/d
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