Suppose you think that reducing the risk of human extinction is the highest-value thing you can do. Or maybe you want to reduce "x-risk" because you're already a comfortable First-Worlder like me and so you might as well do something epic and cool, or because you like the community of people who are doing it already, or whatever.

Suppose also that you think AI is the most pressing x-risk, because (1) mitigating AI risk could mitigate all other existential risks, but not vice-versa, and because (2) AI is plausibly the first existential risk that will occur.

In that case, what should you do? How can you reduce AI x-risk?

It's complicated, but I get this question a lot, so let me try to provide some kind of answer.

Meta-work, strategy work, and direct work

When you're facing a problem and you don't know what to do about it, there are two things you can do:

1. Meta-work: Amass wealth and other resources. Build your community. Make yourself stronger. Meta-work of this sort will be useful regardless of which "direct work" interventions turn out to be useful for tackling the problem you face. Meta-work also empowers you to do strategic work.

2. Strategy work: Purchase a better strategic understanding of the problem you're facing, so you can see more clearly what should be done. Usually, this will consist of getting smart and self-critical people to honestly assess the strategic situation, build models, make predictions about the effects of different possible interventions, and so on. If done well, these analyses can shed light on which kinds of "direct work" will help you deal with the problem you're trying to solve.

When you have enough strategic insight to have discovered some interventions that you're confident will help you tackle the problem you're facing, then you can also engage in:

3. Direct work: Directly attack the problem you're facing, whether this involves technical research, political action, particular kinds of technological development, or something else.

Thinking with these categories can be useful even though the lines between them are fuzzy. For example, you might have to do some basic awareness-raising in order to amass funds for your cause, and then once you've spent those funds on strategy work, your strategy work might tell you that a specific form of awareness-raising is useful for political action that counts as "direct work." Also, some forms of strategy work can feel like direct work, depending on the type of problem you're tackling.





Meta-work for AI x-risk reduction

Make money. Become stronger. Build a community, an audience, a movement. Store your accumulated resources in yourself, in your community, in a donor-advised fund, or in an organization that can advance your causes better than you can as an individual.

Note that if you mostly contribute to meta work, you want to also donate a small sum (say, $15/mo) to strategy work or direct work. If you only contribute to meta work for a while, an outside view (around SI, anyway) suggests there's a good chance you'll never manage to ever do anything non-meta. A perfect Bayesian agent might not optimize this way, but optimal philanthropy for human beings works differently.

Strategy work for AI x-risk reduction

How can we improve our ability to do long-term technological forecasting? Is AGI more likely to be safe if developed sooner (Goertzel & Pitt 2012) or later (Muehlhauser & Salamon 2012)? How likely is hard takeoff vs. soft takeoff? Could we use caged AGIs or WBEs to develop safe AGIs or WBEs? How might we reduce the chances of an AGI arms race (Shulman 2009)? Which interventions should we prioritize now, to reduce AI x-risk?

These questions and many others have received scant written analysis — unless you count the kind of written analysis that is (1) written with much vagueness and ambiguity, (2) written in the author's own idiosyncratic vocabulary, (3) written with few citations to related work, and is (4) spread across a variety of non-linear blog articles, forum messages, and mailing list postings. (The trouble with that kind of written analysis is that it is mostly impenetrable or undiscoverable to most researchers, especially the ones who are very busy because they are highly productive and don't have time to comb through 1,000 messy blog posts.)

Here, then, is how you might help with strategy work for AI x-risk reduction:





Direct work for AI x-risk reduction

We are still at an early stage in doing strategy work on AI x-risk reduction. Because of this, most researchers in the field feel pretty uncertain about which interventions would be most helpful for reducing AI x-risk. Thus, they focus on strategic research, so they can purchase more confidence about which interventions would be helpful.

Despite this uncertainty, I'll list some interventions that at least some people have proposed for mitigating AI x-risk, focusing on the interventions that are actionable today.

Besides engaging in these interventions directly, one may of course help to fund them. I don't currently know of a group pushing for AGI development regulations, or for banning AGI development. You could accelerate AGI by investing in AGI-related companies, or you could accelerate AGI safety research (and AI boxing research) relative to AGI capabilities research by funding SI or FHI, who also probably do the most AI safety promotion work. You could fund research on moral enhancement or cognitive enhancement by offering grants for such research. Or, if you think "low-tech" cognitive enhancement is promising, you could fund organizations like Lumosity (brain training) or the Center for Applied Rationality (rationality training).

Conclusion

This is a brief guide to what you can do to reduce existential risk from AI. A longer guide could describe the available interventions in more detail, and present the arguments for and against each one. But that is "strategic work," and requires lots of time (and therefore money) to produce.