Next week for the 80,000 Hours Podcast I'll be interviewing Carl Shulman, advisor to Open Philanthropy, and generally super informed person about history, technology, possible futures, and a shocking number of other topics.
He has previously appeared on our show and the Dwarkesh Podcast:
- Carl Shulman (Pt 1) - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment
- Carl Shulman (Pt 2) - AI Takeover, Bio & Cyber Attacks, Detecting Deception, & Humanity's Far Future
- Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
He has also written a number of pieces on this forum.
What should I ask him?
Importance of the digital minds stuff compared to regular AI safety; how many early-career EAs should be going into this niche? What needs to happen between now and the arrival of digital minds? In other words, what kind of a plan does Carl have in mind for making the arrival go well? Also, since Carl clearly has well-developed takes on moral status, what criteria he thinks could determine whether an AI system deserves moral status, and to what extent.
Additionally—and this one's fueled more by personal curiosity than by impact—Carl's beliefs on consciousness. Like Wei Dai, I find the case for anti-realism as the answer to the problem of consciousness weak, yet this is Carl's position (according to this old Brian Tomasik post, at least), and so I'd be very interested to hear Carl explain his view.