EA - $20K in Bounties for AI Safety Public Materials by ThomasWoodside

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: $20K in Bounties for AI Safety Public Materials, published by ThomasWoodside on August 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR We are announcing a $20k bounty for publicly-understandable explainers of AI safety concepts. We are also releasing the results of the AI Safety Arguments competition. Background Of the technologists, ML researchers, and policymakers thinking about AI, very few are seriously thinking about AI existential safety. This results in less high-quality research and could also pose difficulties for deployment of safety solutions in the future. There is no single solution to this problem. However, an increase in the number of publicly accessible discussions of AI risk can help to shift the Overton window towards more serious consideration of AI safety. Capability advancements have surprised many in the broader ML community: as they have made discussion of AGI more possible, they can also contribute to making discussion of existential safety more possible. Still, there are not many good introductory resources to the topic or various subtopics. If somebody has no background, they might need to read books or very long sequences of posts to get an idea about why people are worried about AI x-risk. There are a few strong, short, introductions to AI x-risk, but some of them are out of date and they aren’t suited for all audiences. Shane Legg, a co-founder of DeepMind, recently said the following about AGI: If you go back 10-12 years ago the whole notion of Artificial General Intelligence was lunatic fringe. People [in the field] would literally just roll their eyes and just walk away. [I had that happen] multiple times. [...] [But] every year [the number of people who roll their eyes] becomes less. We hope that the number of people rolling their eyes at AI safety can be reduced, too. In the case of AGI, increased AI capabilities and public relations efforts by major AI labs have fed more discussion. Similarly, conscious efforts to increase public understanding and knowledge of safety could have a similar effect. Bounty details The Center for AI Safety is announcing a $20,000 bounty for the best publicly-understandable explainers of topics in AI safety. Winners of the bounty will win $2,000 each, for a total of up to ten possible bounty recipients. The bounty is subject to the Terms and Conditions below. By publicly understandable, we mean understandable to somebody who has never read a book or technical paper on AI safety and who has never read LessWrong or the EA Forum. Work may or may not assume technical knowledge of deep learning and related math, but should make minimal assumptions beyond that. By explainer, we mean that it digests existing research and ideas into a coherent and comprehensible piece of writing. This means that the work should draw from multiple sources. This is not a bounty for original research, and is intended for work that covers more ground at a higher level than the distillation contest. Below are some examples of public materials that we value. This should not be taken as an exhaustive list of all existing valuable public contributions. AI risk executive summary (2014) Concrete Problems in AI Safety (2016) Robert Miles’ YouTube channel (2017-present) AGI Safety From First Principles (2020) The case for taking AI risk seriously as a threat to humanity (2020) Unsolved Problems in ML Safety (2021) X-risk Analysis for AI Research (2022) Note that many of the works above are quite different and do not always agree with each other. Listing them isn’t to say that we agree with everything in them, and we don’t expect to necessarily agree with all claims in the pieces we award bounties to. However, we will not award bounties to work we believe is false or misleading. Here are some categories of work we believe could be valuable: Exe...