“AI Tools for Existential Security” by Lizka, Owen Cotton-Barratt

This is a link post. Rapid AI progress is the greatest driver of existential risk in the world today. But — if handled correctly — it could also empower humanity to face these challenges. Executive summary 1. Some AI applications will be powerful tools for navigating existential risks Three clusters of applications are especially promising: Epistemic applications to help us anticipate and plan for emerging challenges e.g. high-quality AI assistants could prevent catastrophic decisions by helping us make sense of rapidly evolving situations Coordination-enabling applications to help diverse groups work together towards shared goals e.g. automated negotiation could help labs and nations to find and commit to mutually desirable alternatives to racing Risk-targeted applications to address specific challenges e.g. automating alignment research could make the difference between “It's functionally impossible to bring alignment up to the requisite standard in time” and “this is just an issue of devoting enough compute to it” [...] ---Outline:(00:19) Executive summary(03:34) Some AI applications will help navigate existential risks(03:40) Epistemic applications(04:04) Coordination-enabling applications(05:09) Risk-targeted applications(05:26) Other applications?(06:08) We can accelerate helpful AI tools(06:13) There's meaningful room to accelerate some applications(08:12) There are promising strategies for accelerating specific AI applications(12:39) Implications for work on existential risk reduction(14:34) 1. Shift towards accelerating important AI tools(14:40) Speed up AI for current existential security projects(15:33) Work on new AI projects for existential security(15:58) 2. Plan for a world with abundant cognition(17:16) 3. Get ready to help with automation(18:09) Further contextThe original text contained 21 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI. --- First published: March 14th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6m6Q7jgB8iwXGYhXw/ai-tools-for-existential-security --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.