Technical AGI safety research outside AI
I think there are many questions whose answers would be useful for technical AGI safety research, but which will probably require expertise outside AI to answer. In this post I list 30 of them, divided into four categories. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss these questions and why I think they’re important in more detail. I personally think that making progress on the ones in the first category is particularly vital, and plausibly tractable for researchers from a wide range of academic backgrounds. Studying and understanding safety problems How strong are the economic or technological pressures towards building very general AI systems, as opposed to narrow ones? How plausible is the CAIS model of advanced AI capabilities arising from the combination of many narrow services? What are the most compelling arguments for and against discontinuous versus continuous takeoffs? In particular, how should we think about the analogy from human evolution, and the scalabi