Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, you can look up our $30 million grant to OpenAI. I think it was back in 2016–– we wrote about some of the thinking behind it. Part of that grant was getting a board seat for Open Philanthropy for a few years so that we could help with their governance at a crucial early time in their development. I think some people believe that OpenAI has been net negative for the world because of the fact that they have contributed a lot to AI advancing and to AI being sort of hyped, and they think that gives us less time to prepare for it. However, I do think that all else being equal, AI advancing faster gives us less time to prepare. It is a bad thing, but I don't think it's the only consideration. I think OpenAI has done a number of good things too, and has set some important precedents. I think it's probably much more interested in a lot of the issues I'm talking about and risks from advanced AI than like the company that I would guess would exist if they didn't, would be doing similar things. I don't really accept that the idea that OpenAI is a negative force. I think it's highly debatable. We could talk about it all day. If you look at our specific grant, it's even a completely different thing because a lot of that was not just about boosting them, but about getting to be part of their early decision making. I think that was something that there were benefits and was important. My overall view is that I don't look back on that grant as one of the better grants we've made, not one of the worse ones. But certainly we've done a lot of things that have had, you know, that have not worked out. I think there are some times shortly when we've done things that have consequences we didn't intend. No philanthropist can be free of that. What we can try and do is be responsible, seriously do our homework to try to understand things beforehand, see the risks that we're able to see, and think about how to minimize them. Let's talk about ethics. I think you have a very interesting series of blog posts about future proof ethics. Sure. You want to explain what this is first? Sure. I wrote a short blog post series trying to explain some of the philosophical views and ethical views that are common among people who call themselves effective altruists. One of the ideas I appealed to is (I'm not sure I'm getting this right) how a lot of people I know are trying to come up with a system of morality and a system of ethics that would survive a lot of moral progress. They’re trying to come up with a system where if they later became a lot wiser and learned a lot more and reflected on their morality, they wouldn't look back on their earlier actions and think they were doing horrible, monstrous mistakes. A lot of history has just people doing things they thought were fine and right at the time, but now we look back and we're horrified. You could think of yourself asking “What morality can I have that would make it not so likely that if there was a bunch more moral progress and if people learned a lot more, the future won't look back on me and be horrified of what I did.” So I wrote a bit of a series about what it might look like to try to do that, and laid out a few principles of it trying to use this to explain the moral systems a lot of effective altruists tend to use–– which tends to be some flavor of utilitarianism that is often very expansive about like whose rights count. So effective altruists are very interested in future generations that don't exist yet. They're interested in animals being mistreated on factory farms. They're interested in various populations that a lot of people don't care about today, but that there are large numbers of. So I try to explain that. A thing that's important is I laid this view out partly so I could argue against it later and I haven't done the latter yet. So I have a lot of reservations too about the ethical systems that are common with effective altruists.…

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