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This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
After reading this linkpost, I’ve updated toward thinking that there’s actually more agreement between Yudkowsky and Christiano than I thought there was. In summary, they seem to agree on:
-AI systems are being developed that could deliberately and irreversibly disempower humanity. These systems could exist soon, and there won’t necessarily be a "fire alarm."
-Many of the projects intended to help with AI alignment aren't making progress on key difficulties, and don’t really address the “real” problem of reducing risk of catastrophic outcomes.
-AI risk seems especially hard to communicate, because people want to either hear that everything is fine or that the world is ending. See need for closure / ambiguity aversion. The truth is much more confusing, and human minds have a tough time dealing with this.
These points of agreement might seem trivial, but at least Yudkowsky and Christiano are, in my opinion, speaking the same language, i.e., not talking past each other like what appeared to be going on in the ‘08 Hanson-Yudkowsky AI Foom debate.