Holden Karnofsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. One thing I find really interesting about your work is how much it involves the CEO having a deep understanding of all the issues involved. You’re the one who has to deeply understand, for example, moral parliaments or specific forecasts about AI, biological anchors, and whatever else, right? It seems perhaps in other organizations, the CEO just delegates this kind of understanding and just asks for the bullet points. Is this something you think more leaders should be doing or is there something special about your position? I know much less about any given topic than the person who specializes in the topic. I think what I try to do is I try to know enough about the topic that I can manage them effectively, and that's a pretty general corporate best practice. I think it just varies a lot. So, for example, something like keeping our books, keeping our finances, doing the financial audits, and all that stuff–– that's something that's really easy to judge the outputs by without really knowing much about finance at all. You can just say, “Look, was this compliant? Did we do our audit? Did we pass the audit? Do we still have money in the bank? How much money do we have in the bank?” You don't need to know much about it to judge it effectively. However, at any other company, you may need to know a fair amount about some other topics in order to judge them very effectively. If your company is making computers or phones, and design is very important, it would be really bad if the CEO just had like no opinions on design and just thought “I'm going to let our design person decide the design.” It's a central thing to the company. It matters to the company and they should know some things about it. So I do know things that are really central to open philanthropy. What does it mean to do good? How do we handle uncertainty about how to do good? What are the most important causes? If AI might be one of the most important causes, then when might we see transformative AI? What would that mean? How big is the risk of misaligned AI? I think I need to understand those issues well enough to effectively manage people who know a lot more about them than I do. I'm curious–– what do you think about this whole most important century stuff? Does it just strike you as like crazy? What do you think when you read the series? Yeah, obviously through the entire interview, I've been trying to like nitpick at small things, but when I really think about the main claim you're making, it’s that this could be the most important century and transformative AI could happen in the century. If it does, then it's a really big deal and yeah, I don't disagree. That makes a lot of sense. Throughout preparing for the interview and trying to come up with objections, I've just been a little bit more convinced with thinking about, “Is there actually something I could do over my early career that matters? Or is that something that maybe I should just hold off on thinking about?”…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.