Episode 137

I spoke with Davidad Dalrymple about:

His perspectives on AI risk

ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) and its Safeguarded AI Programme

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Davidad is a Programme Director at ARIA. He was most recently a Research Fellow in technical AI safety at Oxford. He co-invented the top-40 cryptocurrency Filecoin, led an international neuroscience collaboration, and was a senior software engineer at Twitter and multiple startups.

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Outline:

(00:00) Intro

(00:36) Calibration and optimism about breakthroughs

(03:35) Calibration and AGI timelines, effects of AGI on humanity

(07:10) Davidad’s thoughts on the Orthogonality Thesis

(10:30) Understanding how our current direction relates to AGI and breakthroughs

(13:33) What Davidad thinks is needed for AGI

(17:00) Extracting knowledge

(19:01) Cyber-physical systems and modeling frameworks

(20:00) Continuities between Davidad’s earlier work and ARIA

(22:56) Path dependence in technology, race dynamics

(26:40) More on Davidad’s perspective on what might go wrong with AGI

(28:57) Vulnerable world, interconnectedness of computers and control

(34:52) Formal verification and world modeling, Open Agency Architecture

(35:25) The Semantic Sufficiency Hypothesis

(39:31) Challenges for modeling

(43:44) The Deontic Sufficiency Hypothesis and mathematical formalization

(49:25) Oversimplification and quantitative knowledge

(53:42) Collective deliberation in expressing values for AI

(55:56) ARIA’s Safeguarded AI Programme

(59:40) Anthropic’s ASL levels

(1:03:12) Guaranteed Safe AI —

(1:03:38) AI risk and (in)accurate world models

(1:09:59) Levels of safety specifications for world models and verifiers — steps to achieve high safety

(1:12:00) Davidad’s portfolio research approach and funding at ARIA

(1:15:46) Earlier concerns about ARIA — Davidad’s perspective

(1:19:26) Where to find more information on ARIA and the Safeguarded AI Programme

(1:20:44) Outro

Links:

Davidad’s Twitter

ARIA homepage

Safeguarded AI Programme

Papers

Guaranteed Safe AI

Davidad’s Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI

Dioptics: a Common Generalization of Open Games and Gradient-Based Learners (2019)

Asynchronous Logic Automata (2008)

Read More in  The Gradient