EA - Part 1: The AI Safety community has four main work groups, Strategy, Governance, Technical and Movement Building by PeterSlattery

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Part 1: The AI Safety community has four main work groups, Strategy, Governance, Technical and Movement Building, published by PeterSlattery on November 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic statusWritten as a non-expert to develop and get feedback on my views, rather than persuade. It will probably be somewhat incomplete and inaccurate, but it should provoke helpful feedback and discussion.AimThis is the first part of my series ‘A proposed approach for AI safety movement building’. Through this series, I outline a theory of change for AI Safety movement building. I don’t necessarily want to immediately accelerate recruitment into AI safety because I take concerns (e.g., 1,2) about the downsides of AI Safety movement building seriously. However, I do want to understand how different viewpoints within the AI Safety community overlap and aggregate.I start by attempting to conceptualise the AI Safety community. I originally planned to outline my theory of change in my first post. However, when I got feedback, I realised that i) I conceptualised the AI Safety community differently from some of my readers, and ii) I wasn’t confident in my understanding of all the key parts.TLDRI argue that the AI Safety community mainly comprises four overlapping, self-identifying, groups: Strategy, Governance, Technical and Movement Building.I explain what each group does and what differentiates it from the other groupsI outline a few other potential work groupsI integrate these into an illustration of my current conceptualisation of the AI Safety communityI request constructive feedback.My conceptualisation of the AI Safety communityAt a high level of simplification and low level of precision, the AI Safety community mainly comprises four overlapping, self-identifying, groups who are working to prevent an AI-related catastrophe. These groups are Strategy, Governance, Technical and Movement Building. These are illustrated below.We can compare the AI Safety community to a government and relate each work group to a government body. I think this helps clarify how the parts of the community fit together (though of course, the analogies are imperfect).StrategyThe AI Safety Strategy group seeks to mitigate AI risk by understanding and influencing strategy.Their work focuses on developing strategies (i.e., plans of action) that maximise the probability that we achieve positive AI-related outcomes and avoid catastrophes. In practice, this includes researching, evaluating, developing, and disseminating strategy (see this for more detail).They attempt to answer questions such as i) ‘how can we best distribute funds to improve interpretability?’, ii) ‘when should we expect transformative AI?’, or iii) “What is happening in areas relevant to AI?”.Due to a lack of ‘strategic clarity/consensus’ most AI strategy work focuses on research. However, Toby Ord’s submission to the UK parliament is arguably an example of developing, and disseminating an AI Safety related strategy.We can compare the Strategy group to the Executive Branch of a government, which sets a strategy for the state and parts of the government, while also attempting to understand and influence the strategies of external parties (e.g., organisations and nations).AI Safety Strategy exemplars: Holden Karnofsky, Toby Ord and Luke Muehlhauser.AI Safety Strategy post examples (1,2,3,4).GovernanceThe AI Safety Governance group seeks to mitigate AI risk by understanding and influencing decision-making.Their work focuses on understanding how decisions are made about AI and what institutions and arrangements help those decisions to be made well. In practice, this includes consultation, research, policy advocacy and policy implementation (see 1 & 2 for more detail).They attempt to answer questions such as i) ...