Defense in Depth: Layered Strategies Against AI Risk (with Li-Lian Ang)
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What is the origin of Blue Dot Impact?
You only need like one person and a very powerful AI system to be able to do this from end to end. If AI systems are so good at spinning up apps, like designing like web pages, doing the whole code review, what's going to happen to all the software engineers? At first, you become reduced to sort of like the managers of AI systems.
How have AI risk concerns evolved over time?
And then over time, why don't you just automate what the managers do? Actually will own all of the value that gets generated by business. it will be like a handful of people. And there's a version of this world where it's like kind of dystopic. If I think too hard about it, I get kind of sad because I'm like, oh my God, there's like so many things happening and it's all really horrible and I wish I could solve it. The whole world feels like it's kind of on fire. So I tried to focus just on the problem that I have like right in front of me.
Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. My name is Gus Ducker, and I'm here with Lilian Ang. Lilian, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me, Gus.
Fantastic.
What specific AI risks are we facing today?
All right. You work at Blue Dot Impact. Maybe give a bit of an introduction to your work there.
So with my work at Blue Dot Impact, I started working with Blue Dot about three years ago. Back then when I first joined, Blue Dot was a small reading group that was being hosted in Cambridge in the UK where people were coming together to discuss about what is this risk with AI that people keep talking about. Seems to be like something like LLMs that were being created and this was like at the beginning of when ChatGPT was just starting to become a thing. But before that, there were many people who were already writing about the potential impacts of such a technology.
How does AI contribute to job disempowerment?
And what this group of people in Cambridge were doing was compiling all of these writings from these different people and working together with Richard Ngou to create a kind of curriculum or a kind of structure for just thinking through what could be the potential impact of AI on society. And then ChatGPT kind of came out and more and more people started using these AI systems and people started to get a lot more worried and feel like this is a bit more real. But at the time, it was still a lot more of a fringe concern. And then this group of people who were like the founders of Blue Dot Impact were then given some money to scale this up and continue to train and bring more people into this. And over time, one of the things that we realized that was really important was that because AI is such a general purpose technology and has such a transformative impact on many aspects of society, we are going to need just like way more people thinking about what we can do to ensure that the way that we build and roll out this technology actually goes well.
And so this is kind of like turned into more of like our current mission statement, which is to try to build the workforce that protects humanity from these risks from AI.
What is the relationship between AI and human alignment?
So how would you say your concerns and the concerns of Blue Dot Impact have changed over time here? What were you concerned about in the beginning and what are you concerned about now?
Yeah. In the beginning, a lot of the risks felt kind of speculative in the sense that people were predicting that these AI systems would be able to do the kind of things that you see it able to do now. Just like code like whole web apps on scratch, be able to like very realistically synthesize people's voices, like generate images and videos.
How is power concentration affecting society with AI?
And now it's being like used a lot in like things like warfare or cyber attacks and there's more like all the crazy, dangerous and scary stuff that people only thought were maybe possible in 10 years, 15 years time. So a lot of the work in the beginning was very focused around like, how do we get more clarity around what the risk actually is and measure it and then convince people that this is something worth paying attention to. And because of how rapidly AI systems have developed, a lot of now the focus has shifted to okay now we don't need to convince people anymore that this is happening because like it's clearly happening it's more of like okay now mobilize people like let's let's really do something about this now yeah yeah and what about specific risks uh which risks are most salient to you now yeah
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the origin of Blue Dot Impact?
0:00–0:19
2
How have AI risk concerns evolved over time?
0:19–1:00
3
What specific AI risks are we facing today?
1:00–1:49
4
How does AI contribute to job disempowerment?
1:49–3:05
5
What is the relationship between AI and human alignment?
3:05–3:41
6
How is power concentration affecting society with AI?
3:41–4:52
7
What strategies can influence frontier AI labs?
4:52–6:12
8
How can we prepare for uncertain AI timelines and strategies?
6:12–55:46
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Future of Life Institute Podcast
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