In my occasional advising calls with aspiring AI Safety folks, one of the most common questions I get is “What courses should I take next?” I often find myself replying: “None; go do stuff instead.”
Fabricando fit faber. By making, one becomes a maker.
There are a lot of courses in AI safety and governance. I’ve helped teach a few. Some are quite good! But after the tenth or twentieth person tells me “I’ve read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and taken BlueDot’s AGI Strategy and the CAIS AI Safety course, I’m not sure whether I should do ARENA or apply to MATS…” I start to notice a pattern. I want to take them by the shoulders and say “THOSE ARE NOT YOUR ONLY CHOICES.”
Look. MATS is pretty cool. Many of their graduates do good work. It’s also, AFAIK, swamped with promising applicants and eager young ML engineers.
If you think MATS sounds like a good fit for you, sure, you should probably apply. And then, while your keyboard is still cooling from the red-hot fire of your earnest expression of interest, you should turn that incandescent determination towards something you can do right now.
First of all, have you contacted your representative to tell them your thoughts on AI? No? Go do that!
Second, have you looked at other action pages for inspiration?
Third, have you considered Just Doing The Thing?
You know, the Thing. The Thing you’ve been thinking about doing, the Thing that leapt out of your mind as an important step while you were worrying about AI, the Thing that perhaps you’ve been putting off until you “have learned more” or “feel more ready”.
Verily I say unto thee: Thou’rt probably ready.
Here’s a good example of a Thing: How can OSINT be used for the enforcement of the EU AI Act?
This policy memo explores the potential of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) for the enforcement of the EU AI Act. Comparing the monitoring of AI development to the existing OSINT efforts in nuclear nonproliferation, this memo advocates for civil society organisations supporting compliance with the EU AI Act through OSINT. Despite its limitations, OSINT is a useful method to support the regulation of especially high-risk systems and it should become a part of the AI policy enforcement toolbox…
This short post was written as a final project for an AI safety course. It took a decent chunk of time—about a month of part-time work and some unknown-to-me number of hours on the part of the author. It makes a straightforward point about a narrow subject: Open-source intelligence can help enforce AI policy. It’s niche, it’s not perfect, but it exists. The author did some research, made a case, cited a few sources, and moved on.
If you’re reading this, you probably can too. There are plenty of open problems in policy or technical governance or, if you’re focused on machine learning, interpretability.
Pick a topic that seems you-shaped. Set a deadline measured in weeks, not months. Make something exist.
You do not need twenty weeks of online courses or a Ph.D. in machine learning to become an Officially Licensed Person Whose Opinions Matter. You can just make things.
They will not necessarily be good things, right away. But the act of making a Thing will make you more the sort of person who makes that sort of Thing. And you can point to the Thing later, when you are applying for MATS or CAIS or UKAISI or wherever, and say, “I did this Thing on my own initiative, because I care. I want to do more Things like this, but with you [for money].”
Go forth and do the Thing.
Although I very much agree with 'go build a thing' motto, I think you risk sounding a lot like a self-help author, if you don't actually address the multiple elephants that are in the room. I list a few of them for you, just as an example:
- Building a thing, whether it be a research paper, a piece of code or anything else, requires some resources. At minimum, the person who is going to build the thing needs to be able to dedicate time to it. In some cases other resources are also needed. Dedicating time usually means lack of time or resources in other areas. Your assumption here is that people are generally privileged.
- I have worked for 22 years in the Tech industry. I have worked for governments, NGOs, commercial SMBs, academic research centres and so on. The organisations that you mention -- plus a few others that you did not include here -- not only control the narrative, but also the funding and in general what counts as an opportunity and who gets to benefit from those opportunities. And group theory in psychology tell us that groups of people will tend to maintain status quo, if they are the beneficiary of it -- ask me why no one gets to do anything other than LLMs these days or why theoretical alignment is virtually dead. This translates to elitism, gate-keeping, or at best just purely biased and unfair behaviour.
- Since said organisations do essentially call the shots, any meaningful amount of work to materialise has to go through their filters, comply with their beliefs, and do not go against their narratives -- ideally, strengthen it, but in some cases they may let you get away with being a bit unorthodox. This means even if you manage to generate any meaningful amount of work on your own, it is going to be dismissed, at best. Why? Think about like this: what would happen if people who didn't have a PhD (as you mentioned in your post as an optional qualification), wrote papers, published them in prestigious journals, got air time in TV, advocated politicians and so on. The very direct side-effect of that is the institution that issues the said PhDs from free funds handed over to them via tax-payer money, now being less relevant, and, of course, that's not ideal because it threatens many people's position and income. This is just an example. I am sure you can use your imagination to see how this could apply to other organisations.
So, although I can agree with "You can just make things." to an extent -- because you are assuming the person who is committing to the work already has the resources needed for producing the work e.g. everyone must be at least as privileged as I am; I highly disagree with "You do not need twenty weeks of online courses or a Ph.D. in machine learning to become an Officially Licensed Person Whose Opinions Matter."
This claim is surprising to me because you have been close enough to this circle to help teaching some of the courses, but you didn't notice that unless you get a 'badge' from people who control the narrative, your opinion doesn't matter. This isn't anything new. It has been the case in many, many fields from academia to foreign policy, and for centuries. It's just your framing of it that makes me react to it, otherwise, it is not anything new or surprising, or frankly worth discussing in most situations.
Regardless, I hope I am wrong and you are right and people without certain privileges get to just do things and those things end up making a difference, even though they don't get the seal of approval from the people and organisations who control the narrative, funding, and opportunities of an entire field. Mind you, none of those people and/or organisation were elected democratically. It's just privilege leading to more privilege.
If that is not the case and somehow I have been misreading the whole society for two decades now, that would be actually a great news to me and I would personally celebrate it, but until then I will have to take your claims as self-help material, at best. I don't think your goal is to promote a certain agenda, even though I don't have anything to back it up.
If you think I am wrong, please do educate me by all means. I am here to learn.
[Edited for fixing some typos.]
I agree that doing things takes time. If someone does not have the slack in their lives to do anything other than scrape by, I don't recommend they force themselves. (I do recommend they call a representative about stopping the AI race. That takes mere minutes.) It's not healthy to try to shoulder the world's burdens when one's knees are already buckling. This post is for everyone else.
If any org I've worked for meaningfully "controlled the narrative", the world would look very different than it does. The narrative, such as it is, does not look very controlled to me.
I have seen many good people make changes happen simply by doing good work on their own time. Does this require slack, runway, and no small amount of luck? Sure. Do good and competent people have less reach than a sane and functional society would afford them? Probably. But one does have to actually take shots on goal in order to score, even when most of them miss, and that's no less true for sounding vaguely like something out of a self-help book.
If you truly believe that impressing some gatekeeping organization is necessary to doing good work, then by all means set out to impress them. Sometimes it's indeed necessary; for instance, I don't see an international halt to AI development arriving without someone getting the U.S. government on board.
But I've taken direction from a high school dropout. The credentials bar is lower than you think.
I think you are still missing the point here. It is an illogical expectation to ask or recommend people to commit to any amount of work that is very likely to be outright dismissed. This isn't about how much someone care about something or whether committing a few hours day is going to make them bankrupt or not; it is about deciding whether something is worth doing or not, when you already know the field is dominated by elitism and gate-keeping, and you don't have free-money handed to you to produce yet another disposable paper.
To me it seems that you are comparing yourself with the U.S. Congress and concluding that since you are not making the laws, you are not controlling the narrative and if you were in charge we would live in a very different world, which I assume you also mean a significantly better world, by that. Besides how scary this sort of thought process is i.e. "people who think like me could make the world much better," I think you are also missing the point about what the narrative is and who is feeding the media and politicians what such ideas.
I would be very keen to know a single example of someone who has contributed to the narrative, or changed how the funds and opportunities are controlled by those few how do control virtually everything in this field, that was not in the circle that you are very much familiar with. Just one example. Somebody who did not work for this company or that company, wasn't part of this or that organisation, hadn't attended this or that course, wasn't friend with this person or that person, didn't already have a huge social following and so on. If you could mention who this person is, how did they manage to change the narrative, what was the effect of that and so, I would honestly accept that I was totally wrong here.
Again, I would really like to get the name of these people and have a look how privileged they were or weren't. And I am not talking about someone writing a maths paper, or planting a tree, or donating £50 to Cancer Research. We are talking about AI here and possibilities of existential threats. I would really like to get to know some of the many people that you are already familiar with who have done this already.
Look, no one is saying people who do not try should expect results. I don't know why you think that was my point and whether this is deflection or misunderstanding. We are talking about elitism, gate-keeping, and things like that. Your original post sounds like self-help material because it does not address the issues that one has to overcome, just so to be in a position that their voice could be heard. It's like the hustle culture: you are not working hard enough otherwise you would be making millions, like me.
What you are saying essentially is "Hey, do you know why you haven't made a meaningful contribution yet? Because you either have nothing to say, or haven't tried yet. If you had something to say and had tried, you'd be like me and my friends. No especial priveldges needed." And I think that line of thinking is massively flawed, whether you like it or not.
I honestly find this bit quite strange. If someone accuses me of elitism or gate-keeping, I would not go ahead and recommend them to "please the gate-keepers, by all means," which is the classic, textbook gate-keeping. If that is your mindset, then you should probably move to a (more) corrupt country where bribery is normal, because you can do a lot with pleasing the gate-keepers with a bit of money and knowing a few important people.
And that is exactly why we are talking about this. There are people who already have proposed billion-dollar programmes to make an "American AI" or to spend millions and millions of dollars to lobby (read, bribe) politicians to achieve exactly what you said. What's wrong with that? Assuming if the U.S. comes and says "Alright guys, we are calling it a day. No more AI development from now onwards until we let you know," thinking that every other country is going to stand there and say "Of course, thanks for letting us know. We'll wait for your green signal then. Have a lovely day." This is just naive. Sure, it makes a lot of people wealthy, but it is absurd. Unbelivebly absurd.
If people and organisations who do control the narrative hadn't sucked all the oxygen out of the air and hadn't made so much noise so that no one else could be heard, maybe, maybe some other people -- other than that your favourite think tank or organisation -- could propose a more practical solution.
I honestly don't know how to answer this. I worked for a research centre in Cambridge that even the UK Prime Minster needed especial permissions from the EU to visit or access certain parts or data. In three years and from more than 3000 staff, I never heard a single person saying "Oh, by the way, last weekend I took an advice for a high-school dropout. Isn't that cool?"
I don't know why you thought "This person that is criticising my post is worried that my friends and I are not going to listen to them. Let me tell them that in fact, I have once taken direction from a high-school dropout. That must reassure them there is no elitism or gate-keeping here, at all."
Who was this high-school dropout person? What did they get in return of helping you? When and where did you credit them? How did you compensate them for the valuable advice that made you change direction? What better opportunities did you create for them in return??? Assuming you are not considering me a lesser-being; I have tried to point out to you that your initial post isn't really helpful for anyone who is not as privileged as you are, and you have somehow managed to give me an even less helpful answer to address my criticism. Why do you think I should take your proud, humble moment as an evidence that you are right?
If you were the person who would take direction from a high-school dropout, you would have stopped before answering my previous reply, thought for a second, and admitted that elitism and gate-keeping are well-known phenomena in our societies. Trying to defend them or deflect is seldom fruitful, especially if you, the defender, is a beneficiary of the system.
And, of course, you had to finish your post by a "trust me, bro" statement, asserting that I don't know where the bar is in regards to needed credentials. Sure. You are the only person who knows how everything works and you apparently know what I know and don't know too. Well done. This conversation has been quite reassuring.