AI ALIGNMENT FORUM
AF

by Andrew Critch, Nick Hay
9 min read
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Also available on the EA Forum.
Appendix to: Encultured AI, Part 1: Enabling New Benchmarks
Followed by: Encultured AI, Part 2: Providing a Service

Appendix 1: “Trending” AI x-safety research areas

We mentioned a few areas of “trending” AI x-safety research above; below are some more concrete examples of what we mean:

  • Trustworthiness & truthfulness:
    • Owain Evans, Owen Cotton-Barratt and others have authored “Truthful AI: Developing and governing AI that does not lie” (arxiv, 2021; twitter thread).
    • Andreas Stuhlmüller, Jungwon Byun and others at Ought.org are building an AI-powered research assistant called Elicit (website); here is the product: https://elicit.org/search.
       
  • Task-specific (narrow) preference learning:
    • Paul Christiano et al (arxiv, 2017) developed a data-efficient preference-learning technique for training RL-based systems, which is now very widely cited (scholar).
    • Jan Leike, now at OpenAI, leads a team working on ‘scalable alignment’  using preference-learning techniques (arxiv, 2018) (blog).
       
  • Interpretability:
    • Chris Olah (scholar) leads an interpretability research group at Anthropic.  Anthropic (website) is culturally very attuned to large-scale risks from AI, including existential risks.
    • Buck Shlegeris and others at Redwood Research (website) have built an interpretability tool for analyzing transformer networks trained on natural language (demo).
    • Prof. Cynthia Rudin at Duke (homepage) approaches interpretability by trying to replace black-box models with more interpretable ones (arxiv, 2018), and we know from conversations with her that she is open to applications of her work to existential safety.
       
  • Robustness & risk management:
    • Prof. Jaime Fisac at Princeton (homepage) researches AI safety for robotics, high-dimensional control systems and multi-agent systems (scholar), including provable robustness guarantees.  He was previously a PhD student at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI), provided extensive feedback on AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety (ARCHES) (arxiv, 2020), and is very attuned to existential safety as a cause area.
    • Prof. David Krueger at Cambridge (scholar) studies out-of-distribution generalization (pdf, 2021), and is currently taking on students.
    • Adam Gleave (homepage) is a final-year PhD student at CHAI / UC Berkeley, and studies out-of-distribution robustness for deep RL.
    • Sam Toyer (scholar), also a PhD student at CHAI, has developed a benchmark for robust imitation learning (pdf, 2020).

Appendix 2: “Emerging” AI x-safety research areas

In this post, we classified cooperative AI and multi-stakeholder control of AI systems as “emerging” topics in AI x-safety.  Here’s more about what we mean, and why:

Cooperative AI

This area is “emerging” in x-safety because there’s plenty of attention to the issue of cooperation from both policy-makers and AI researchers, but not yet much among folks focused on x-risk.

Existential safety attention on cooperative AI:

  • Many authors — too many to name! — have remarked on the importance of international coordination on AI safety efforts, including existential safety.  For instance, there is a Wikipedia article on AI arms races (wikipedia).  This covers the human–human side of the cooperative AI problem.

AI research on cooperative AI:

  • Multi-agent systems research has a long history in AI (scholar search), as does multi-agent reinforcement learning (scholar search).
  • DeepMind’s Multi-agent Learning team has recently written number papers examining competition and cooperation between artificial agents (website).
  • OpenAI has done some work on multi-agent interaction, e.g. emergent tool use in multi-agent interaction (arxiv).
  • Prof. Jakob Foerster at Oxford (scholar search), and previously OpenAI and Facebook, has also looked a lot at AI interaction dynamics.  We also know that Jakob is open to applications of his work to existential safety.
  • Prof. Vincent Conitzer at CMU has studied cooperation extensively (scholar search), and we know from conversations with him that he is open to applications of his work to existential safety.  He recently started a new research center called the Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab (FOCAL) (website).

AI research motivated by x-safety, on cooperative AI:

  • Critch’s work on Löbian cooperation (pdf, 2016) was motivated in part by x-safety, as was LaVictoire et al’s work (pdf, 2014).
  • Caspar Oesterheld, a PhD student of Vincent Conitzer, has studied cooperation of artificial systems (scholar), and acknowledges the Center for Long-Term Risk in some of his work (CLR post, 2019), so one could argue this work was motivated in part by AI x-safety.
  • Scott Emmons, a PhD student of Stuart Russell, showed that agents with equal value functions do not necessarily cooperate in a stable way, and that a solid fraction of simple symmetric games — 36% or more — have this instability property (pdf; 2022; see table 3).  This work was motivated in part by its relevance to existential safety.  For instance, the CIRL formulation of value-alignment is a common-payoff game between one human and one AI system (arxiv, 2016), as is the altruistically-motivated activity of conserving humanity’s existence (when actions are restricted to the scope of altruistic / public service roles), so understanding the impact of symmetry constraints on such games (e.g., for fairness) is important.
  • AI x-safety research on cooperative AI.  There isn’t much technical work on cooperative AI directly aiming at x-safety, except for the naming of open problems and problem areas.  For instance:
    • Critch and David Krueger wrote about the relevance of multi-agent and multi-principal dynamics to x-safety, in Sections 6-9 of AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety (ARCHES) (arxiv, 2020). 
    • Allan Dafoe and a number of coauthors from the DeepMind multi-agent learning group authored Open Problems in Cooperative AI (arxiv, 2020), and the Cooperative AI Foundation (website), announced in a Nature commentary (pdf, 2021), are intent on supporting research to address it.  We consider CAIF’s attention to this area to be “existential attention” because many of the people involved seem to us to be genuinely attentive to existential risk as an issue. 
    • Jesse Clifton at the Center on Long-Term Risk has presented a research agenda prioritizing cooperation as a problem-area for transformative AI (webpage). 

Multi-stakeholder control of AI systems

This area is “emerging” in x-safety because there seems to be attention to the issue of multi-stakeholder control from both policy-makers and AI researchers, but not yet much among AI researchers overtly attentive to x-risk:

Existential safety attention on multi-stakeholder control of AI:

Many authors and bloggers discuss the problem of aligning AI systems with the values of humanity-as-a-whole, e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky’s coherent extrapolated volition concept.  However, these discussions have not culminated in practical algorithms for sharing control of AI systems, unless you count the S-process algorithm for grant-making or the Robust Rental Harmony algorithm for rent-sharing, which are not AI systems by most standards.

Also, AI policy discussions surrounding existential risk frequently invoke the importance of multi-stakeholder input into human institutions involved in AI governance (as do discussions of governance on all topics), such as:

However, so far there has been little advocacy in x-safety for AI technologies to enable multi-stakeholder input directly into AI systems, with the exception of:

The following position paper is not particularly x-risk themed, but is highly relevant:

Computer science research on multi-stakeholder control of decision-making:

There is a long history of applicable research on the implementation of algorithms for social choice, which could be used to share control of AI systems in various ways, but most of this work does not come from sources overtly attentive to existential risk:

AI research on multi-stakeholder control of AI systems is sparse, but present.  Notably, Ken Goldberg’s “telegardening” platform allows many web users to simultaneously control a gardening robot: https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/ 

AI research motivated by x-safety, on multi-stakeholder control of AI is hard to find.  Critch has worked on a few papers on negotiable reinforcement learning (Critch, 2017a; Critch, 2017b; Desai, 2018; Fickinger, 2020).  MIRI researcher Abram Demski has a blog post on comparing utility functions across agents, which is a highly relevant to aggregating preferences (Demski, 2020)

AI x-safety research on multi-stakeholder control of AI — i.e., technical research directly assessing the potential efficacy of AI control-sharing mechanisms in mitigating x-risk — basically doesn’t exist.
 

Culturally-grounded AI

 This area is missing in technical AI x-safety research, but has received existential safety attention, AI research attention, as well as considerable attention in public discourse:

*** END APPENDIX ***

Followed by: Encultured AI, Part 2: Providing a Service

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