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Show Notes
In a classic taxonomy of risks developed by Nick Bostrom (seen below), existential risks are characterized as risks which are both terminal in severity and transgenerational in scope. If we were to maintain the scope of a risk as transgenerational and increase its severity past terminal, what would such a risk look like? What would it mean for a risk to be transgenerational in scope and hellish in severity?
Astronomical Future Suffering and Superintelligence is the second podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, this series will be covering and exploring the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. Broadly, we will be having discussions with technical and non-technical researchers across areas such as machine learning, AI safety, governance, coordination, ethics, philosophy, and psychology as they pertain to the project of creating beneficial AI. If this sounds interesting to you, we hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, or your preferred podcast site/application.
If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.
In this podcast, Lucas spoke with Kaj Sotala, an associate researcher at the Foundational Research Institute. He has previously worked for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and has publications on AI safety, AI timeline forecasting, and consciousness research.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- The definition of and a taxonomy of suffering risks
- How superintelligence has special leverage for generating or mitigating suffering risks
- How different moral systems view suffering risks
- What is possible of minds in general and how this plays into suffering risks
- The probability of suffering risks
- What we can do to mitigate suffering risks
In this interview we discuss ideas contained in a paper by Kaj Sotala and Lukas Gloor. You can find the paper here: Superintelligence as a Cause or Cure for Risks of Astronomical Suffering.
