Davidad Dalrymple: Towards Provably Safe AI

Episode 137I spoke with Davidad Dalrymple about:* His perspectives on AI risk* ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) and its Safeguarded AI ProgrammeEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Davidad is a Programme Director at ARIA. He was most recently a Research Fellow in technical AI safety at Oxford. He co-invented the top-40 cryptocurrency Filecoin, led an international neuroscience collaboration, and was a senior software engineer at Twitter and multiple startups.Find me on Twitter for updates on new episodes, and reach me at [email protected] for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (00:36) Calibration and optimism about breakthroughs* (03:35) Calibration and AGI timelines, effects of AGI on humanity* (07:10) Davidad’s thoughts on the Orthogonality Thesis* (10:30) Understanding how our current direction relates to AGI and breakthroughs* (13:33) What Davidad thinks is needed for AGI* (17:00) Extracting knowledge* (19:01) Cyber-physical systems and modeling frameworks* (20:00) Continuities between Davidad’s earlier work and ARIA* (22:56) Path dependence in technology, race dynamics* (26:40) More on Davidad’s perspective on what might go wrong with AGI* (28:57) Vulnerable world, interconnectedness of computers and control* (34:52) Formal verification and world modeling, Open Agency Architecture* (35:25) The Semantic Sufficiency Hypothesis* (39:31) Challenges for modeling* (43:44) The Deontic Sufficiency Hypothesis and mathematical formalization* (49:25) Oversimplification and quantitative knowledge* (53:42) Collective deliberation in expressing values for AI* (55:56) ARIA’s Safeguarded AI Programme* (59:40) Anthropic’s ASL levels* (1:03:12) Guaranteed Safe AI — * (1:03:38) AI risk and (in)accurate world models* (1:09:59) Levels of safety specifications for world models and verifiers — steps to achieve high safety* (1:12:00) Davidad’s portfolio research approach and funding at ARIA* (1:15:46) Earlier concerns about ARIA — Davidad’s perspective* (1:19:26) Where to find more information on ARIA and the Safeguarded AI Programme* (1:20:44) OutroLinks:* Davidad’s Twitter* ARIA homepage* Safeguarded AI Programme* Papers* Guaranteed Safe AI* Davidad’s Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI* Dioptics: a Common Generalization of Open Games and Gradient-Based Learners (2019)* Asynchronous Logic Automata (2008) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe