Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors

Summary Dictators who exhibited highly narcissistic, psychopathic, or sadistic traits were involved in some of the greatest catastrophes in human history.  Malevolent individuals in positions of power could negatively affect humanity’s long-term trajectory by, for example, exacerbating international conflict or other broad risk factors. Malevolent humans with access to advanced technology—such as whole brain emulation or other forms of transformative AI—could cause serious existential risks and suffering risks. We therefore consider interventions to reduce the expected influence of malevolent humans on the long-term future. The development of manipulation-proof measures of malevolence seems valuable, since they could be used to screen for malevolent humans in high-impact settings, such as heads of government or CEOs. We also explore possible future technologies that […]

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Risk factors for s-risks

Traditional disaster risk prevention has a concept of risk factors. These factors are not risks in and of themselves, but they increase either the probability or the magnitude of a risk. For instance, inadequate governance structures do not cause a specific disaster, but if a disaster strikes it may impede an effective response, thus increasing the damage.

Rather than considering individual scenarios of how s-risks could occur, which tends to be highly speculative, this post instead looks at risk factors – i.e. factors that would make s-risks more likely or more severe.

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Challenges to implementing surrogate goals

Surrogate goals might be one of the most promising approaches to reduce (the disvalue resulting from) threats. The idea is to add to one’s current goals a surrogate goal that one did not initially care about, hoping that any potential threats will target this surrogate goal rather than what one initially cared about.

In this post, I will outline two key obstacles to a successful implementation of surrogate goals.

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A framework for thinking about AI timescales

To steer the development of powerful AI in beneficial directions, we need an accurate understanding of how the transition to a world with powerful AI systems will unfold. A key question is how long such a transition (or “takeoff”) will take.

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Using surrogate goals to deflect threats

Agents that threaten to harm other agents, either in an attempt at extortion or as part of an escalating conflict, are an important form of agential s-risks. To avoid worst-case outcomes resulting from the execution of such threats, I suggest that agents add a “meaningless” surrogate goal to their utility function.

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S-risk FAQ

In the essay Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: A Neglected Priority, s-risks (also called suffering risks or risks of astronomical suffering) are defined as “events that would bring about suffering on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding all suffering that has existed on Earth so far”.

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Focus areas of worst-case AI safety

Efforts to shape advanced artificial intelligence (AI) may be among the most promising altruistic endeavours. If the transition to advanced AI goes wrong, the worst outcomes may involve not only the end of human civilization, but also astronomical amounts of suffering – a so-called s-risk.

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Uncertainty smooths out differences in impact

Suppose you investigated two interventions A and B and came up with estimates for how much impact A and B will have. Your best guess is that A will spare a billion sentient beings from suffering, while B “only” spares a thousand beings. Now, should you actually believe that A is many orders of magnitude more effective than B?

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Arguments for and against moral advocacy

This post analyses key strategic questions on moral advocacy, such as:

What does moral advocacy look like in practice? Which values should we spread, and how?
How effective is moral advocacy compared to other interventions such as directly influencing new technologies?
What are the most important arguments for and against focusing on moral advocacy?

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Strategic implications of AI scenarios

Efforts to mitigate the risks of advanced artificial intelligence may be a top priority for effective altruists. If this is true, what are the best means to shape AI? Should we write math-heavy papers on open technical questions, or opt for broader, non-technical interventions like values spreading?

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Tool use and intelligence: A conversation

This post is a discussion between Lukas Gloor and Tobias Baumann on the meaning of tool use and intelligence, which is relevant to our thinking about the future or (artificial) intelligence and the likelihood of AI scenarios.

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Training neural networks to detect suffering

Imagine a data set of images labeled “suffering” or “no suffering”. For instance, suppose the “suffering” category contains documentations of war atrocities or factory farms, and the “no suffering” category contains innocuous images – say, a library. We could then use a neural network or other machine learning algorithms to learn to detect suffering based on that data.

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