WillPearson's Quick takes

I'm currently drafting a post on current sycophantic AI as something that threatens core human skills of reasoning, maths etc. Based on aviation skills fade and recent possible impact on CS outcomes. This could have knock on impacts to other causes as degraded skills might lead to degraded outcomes in fields like AI alignment or ethical reasoning in time.

I would appreciate some human collaboration on it. I don't have huge amount of time (so it is AI written currently, ironically, but writing ITN notes isn't my cue competency anyway).

I had an idea for a new concept in alignment that might allow nuanced and human like goals (if it can be fully developed).

Has anyone explored using neural clusters found by mechanistic interpretability as part of a goal system? 

So that you would look for clusters for certain things e.g. happiness or autonomy and have that neural clusters in the goal system.  If the system learned over time it could refine that concept. 

This was inspired by how human goals seem to have concepts that change over time in them. 

I've got an idea for a business that could help biosecurity by helping stop accidental leaks of data to people that shouldn't have it. I'm thinking about proving the idea with personal identifiable information. Looking for feedback and collaborators.

So I've been trying to think of ways to improve the software landscape. If we do this it might make traditional software more aligned with human values and it's models for building more advanced systems too.

One piece I've been looking at is software licensing.

Instead of traditional open source, have an easy to get license for a version of software, based on a cryptographic identity. This could make it less frictional to be a bad actor.

This license is checked on startup that it matches the version of the software running (git sha stored somewhere). If it doesn’t the software fails to start. It can also be used by clients and servers to identify each other but does not have to marry up one to one with a person’s identity.

The license is acquired as easily as a let’s encrypt style certificate, but the identity has to part of the reputation system (which might require a fee). 

The software might require a license from one of many reputation monitoring systems. So that no monitoring system becomes a single point of failure. 

Edit: effective altruism might decide to fund awards for work of software ecosystem engineering with non software engineers as the judges to bring this digital infrastructure to the publics consciousness and incentivise making it understandable as well

I'm trying to create a website/organisation/community around exploring difficult problems and improving the decisions people make.

I've currently got an alpha website where people can interact with AI in different scenarios and record the decisions and reasoning they make, to inform others. 

I'm curious how others would approach this endeavour (I don't have a broad network)

How should important ideas around topics like AI and biorisk be shared? Is there a best practice, or government departments that specialise in handling that?

My blog might be of interest to people 

I've been thinking a bit around secret efforts in AI safety research.

My current thoughts are around: if it is or does occur what non secret efforts might be needed? E.g. if it develops safe AI media that shows postive outcomes from AI might be needed so that people aren't overly scared.   

Oh and AI policy might be needed too, perhaps limiting certain types of AI (agentic stuff).