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Published · transcript-backedPaul Christiano: commitment
31 Oct 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover
“The answer is pretty much always going to be like, we are not collectively ready because we're sort of not even all collectively engaged in this process.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Paul Christiano
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- commitment
- Recorded
- 31 Oct 2023
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…In which we're happy with the thing. What would it look like for us to say we're ready to hand off the baton? What would make you satisfied? And the reason it's relevant to ask you is because you're on Anthropics Long Term Benefit trust and you'll choose the majority of the board members. In the long run at Anthropic, these will presumably be the people who decide if Anthropic gets AI first, what the AI ends up doing. So what is the version of that that you would be happy with? My main high level take here is that I would be unhappy about a world where Anthropic just makes some call and Anthropic is like, here's the kind of AI. We've seen enough, we're ready to hand off the future to this kind of AI. So procedurally, I think it's not a decision that kind of I want to be making personally or I want Anthropic to be making. So I kind of think from the perspective of that decision making are those challenges? The answer is pretty much always going to be like, we are not collectively ready because we're sort of not even all collectively engaged in this process. And I think from the perspective of an AI company, you kind of don't have this fast handoff option. You kind of have to be doing the option value to build the technology in a way that doesn't lock humanity into one course path. This isn't answering your full question, but this is answering the part that I think is most relevant to governance questions for Anthropic. You don't have to speak on behalf of Anthropic. I'm not asking about the process by which we would, as a civilization, agree to hand off. I'm just saying, okay, I personally, it's hard for me to imagine in 100 years that these things are still our slaves. And if they are, I think that's not the best world. So at some point, we're handing off the baton. Where would you be satisfied with this is an arrangement between the humans and AIS where I'm happy to let the rest of the universe or the rest of time play out.…
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