Coauthor: particlemania

Cross-posted from EA forum here.

This is a post about how the AI Objectives Institute plans to implement a differential technological development strategy in its research and development projects. For a complete list of projects, see our Research Brief.

With a seeming Cambrian explosion of capabilities from the progress in generative models, there has been an increased need for differential exploration – of alternative (more alignable and governable) paradigms, applications of current capabilities for increasing the sanity waterline, and experimenting with institutional configurations and ways of deploying capabilities directed robustly towards human (and sentient) flourishing.

The AI Objectives Institute (AOI) aims to fill the role we think is necessary here. Using differential technological development and exploration as a guiding principle, we'll work on improving strategies for prioritization models of safe and beneficial deployment of capabilities, and will conduct applied AI research on solutions we identify based on those strategies. Our goal is to make both theoretical and applied progress towards the following goals:

Applying current and future AI to solving problems of alignment and governance
Safeguarding the human race against the unknown consequences of technological development
Steering AI toward applications that benefit humanity

In this post, we'll limit discussion of differential technological development to our thoughts about applying that principle to AI and other transformative technologies. For more general discussions of differential strategies, see:

Differential Technology Development: A Responsible Innovation Principle for Navigating Technology Risks (Sandbrink et al, 2022), a paper we draw from heavily (including the definition we use above)
This EA forum post, in which two authors of the Sandbrink et al paper summarize their work
This EA forum post discussing the differences between differential technical development, differential intellectual progress, and differential progress as a whole.

If after reading this you want to collaborate with us, or if you'd rather send us feedback directly instead of commenting on this post, reach out to hello@objective.is.

Differential Development for AI & Social Systems

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