EA - Center on Long-Term Risk: 2023 Fundraiser by stefan.torges

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: Center on Long-Term Risk: 2023 Fundraiser, published by stefan.torges on December 9, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryOur goal: CLR’s goal is to reduce the worst risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks). Our concrete research programs are on AI conflict, Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds (ECL), and s-risk macrostrategy. We ultimately want to identify and advocate for interventions that reliably shape the development and deployment of advanced AI systems in a positive way.Fundraising: We have had a short-term funding shortfall and a lot of medium-term funding uncertainty. Our minimal fundraising goal is $750,000. We think this is a particularly good time to donate to CLR for people interested in supporting work on s-risks, work on Cooperative AI, work on acausal interactions, or work on generally important longtermist topics.Causes of Conflict Research Group: In 2022, we started evaluating various interventions related to AI conflict (e.g., surrogate goals, preventing conflict-seeking preferences). We also started developing methods for evaluating conflict-relevant properties of large language models. Our priorities for next year are to continue developing and evaluating these, and to continue our work with large language models.Other researchers: In 2022, others researchers at CLR worked on topics including the implications of ECL, the optimal timing of AI safety spending, the likelihood of earth-originating civilization encountering extraterrestrials, and program equilibrium. Our priorities for the next year include continuing some of this work, alongside other work including on strategic modeling and agent foundations.S-risk community-building: Our s-risk community building programs received very positive feedback. We had calls or meetings with over 150 people interested in contributing to s-risk reduction. In 2023, we plan to at least continue our existing programs (i.e., intro fellowship, Summer Research Fellowship, retreat) if we can raise the required funds. If we can even hire additional staff, we want to expand our outreach function and create more resources for community members (e.g., curated reading lists, career guide, introductory content, research database).What CLR is trying to do and whyOur goal is to reduce the worst risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks). These are scenarios where a significant fraction of future sentient beings are locked into intense states of misery, suffering, and despair. We currently believe that such lock-in scenarios most likely involve transformative AI systems. So we work on making the development and deployment of such systems safer.Concrete research programs:AI conflict: We want to better understand how we can prevent AI systems from engaging in catastrophic conflict. (The majority of our research efforts)Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds (ECL): ECL refers to the idea that we make it more likely that other agents across the universe take actions that are good for our values by taking actions that are good according to their values. A potential implication is that we should act so as to maximize an impartial weighted sum of the values of agents across the universe.S-risk macrostrategy: In general, we want to better understand how we can reduce suffering in the long-term future. There might be causes or considerations that we have overlooked so far.Most of our work is research with the goal of identifying threat models and possible interventions. In the case of technical AI interventions (which is the bulk of our object-level work so far), we then plan to evaluate these interventions and advocate for their inclusion in AI development.Next to our research, we also run events and fellowships to identify and support people wanting to work on these problems.FundraisingFunding situation...