Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.

This is a review of Paul Christiano's article "where I agree and disagree with Eliezer". Written for the LessWrong 2022 Review.

In the existential AI safety community, there is an ongoing debate between positions situated differently on some axis which doesn't have a common agreed-upon name, but where Christiano and Yudkowsky can be regarded as representatives of the two directions[1]. For the sake of this review, I will dub the camps gravitating to the different ends of this axis "Prosers" (after prosaic alignment) and "Poets"[2]. Christiano is a Proser, and so are most people in AI safety groups in the industry. Yudkowsky is a typical Poet, people in MIRI and the agent foundations community tend to also be such.

Prosers tend to be more optimistic, lend more credence to slow takeoff, and place more value on [...]

---

Outline:

(02:33) Takeoff Speeds

(05:09) Missing Ingredients

(05:56) Recursive Self-Improvement

(07:45) Attitude Towards Prosaic Alignment

(08:26) Mesaoptimization

(10:01) Factored Cognition

(12:24) Competitiveness

(14:41) Unknown Unknowns

(16:32) The Metadebate

(20:46) Miscellaneous Comments

(25:22) Highlighted Agreements

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
December 27th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8HYJwQepynHsRKr6j/critical-review-of-christiano-s-disagreements-with-yudkowsky

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Critical review of Christiano’s disagreements with Yudkowsky” by Vanessa Kosoy

LessWrong (30+ Karma)