PipFoweraker
Managing Governance in Australia's Sixth Least Evil Bank
I have been consistently donating a significant portion of my income since I started full time employment at 17 out of self-derived principles of charity that, in hindsight, were reflexively utilitarian - although I didn't have the language for it then.
I've spent 90% of my career working in the public service, primarily out of a desire to help other people and the community at large. My recent time working in private finance has highlighted that although the pay is better, I am far less motivated to work for the profit of entities that don't operate in alignment with my ethical principles.
I've spent the last few years educating myself on effective approaches to getting things done - the mechanics of project delivery, policy construction, and high level negotiations in Government as well as in some business arenas. I'm now trying to figure out how to put the skillset I have - project and program management, creating organisational workflows, managing medium-sized remote teams, and clear inter-group and intra-skateholder communication, to use in the EA field.
Alternate, potentially high-impact paths I am considering taking include entrepreneurship, something I have some experiences in, and operational or policy work in AI governance spaces. I do not presently have undergraduate-level education as I left home and started full time work quite young.
My current uncertainties are that I am not highly confident I have the raw intelligence to usefully contribute in a technical field, but I'm also not sure whether my more managerial and operational skills are of high enough quality for critical role hires. I'd like to have some guidance in clarifying those uncertainties!
I have weak intuitions this isn't true but not in ways that are articulable
'Will' is not 'could', poor multipolar outcomes are not deterministic
Mild disagree; I think both are relatively valuable compared to other, more popular research agendas
I think it's likely moral catastrophes will still happen to digital minds; AI alignment to humans may reduce frequency, severity, amount.
Tractable, important, and relatively neglected.
Anything that permits the ecosystem for non-uplifted humans to exist through AGI/ASI avoids moral harm to animals, and aligned outcomes seem likely to lead to more futures where animal suffering is reduced while animals still get to exist.
I enjoyed the Donation Election mechanism! It was good to get some exposure to charities I hadn't considered before, stack ranking things is always fun, and even more so when it's for a good (set of) causes!
Commenting to note that Ashgro is another fiscal sponsorship and ops-support org that’s been operating post-FTX as well that focuses on AI safety and adjacent projects.
Excellent paper with a good summary / coverage of international governance options. One hindrance to international cooperation that other regulatory movements have come into has been the challenge in getting dominant players to cede their advantaged positions or to incur what they would see as disproportionate costs. The challenge around getting large economies & polluters to agree to meaningful carbon measures is indicative.
In the AI space, a few actors large State both perceive each other to be strategic competitors, have a disproportionate amount of access to talent, capital and hardware, and have recently signalled a decrease in willingness to bind themselves to cooperative ventures. Thinking particularly here of the US's difference in signalling coming out of the Paris Summit compared to their positions at Berkeley and Seoul.
One possible way that other State level actors in the space could seek to influence the forerunners at the moment is covered by Christoph, Lipcsey and Kgomo writing commentary for the Equiano Institute. Their argument is that already existing groups like the EU, African Union and ASEAN can combine to provide regulatory leadership, inclusive AI development and supply chain resilience, respectively. I think this strategic approach dovetails nicely with challenges raised in the paper about how to effectively motivate China and the US from engaging with multilateral treaties.
Paper URL: https://www.equiano.institute/assets/R1.pdf
Awesome, thanks for the update :-)