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Attention in the AI safety community has increasingly started to include strategic considerations of coordination between relevant actors in the field of AI and AI safety, in addition to the steadily growing work on the technical considerations of building safe AI systems. This shift has several reasons: Multiplier effects, pragmatism, and urgency. Given the benefits of coordination between those working towards safe superintelligence, this book surveys promising research in this emerging field regarding AI safety. On a meta-level, the hope is that this book can serve as a map to inform those working in the field of AI coordination about other promising efforts. While this book focuses on AI safety coordination, coordination is important to most other known existential risks (e.g., biotechnology risks), and future, human-made existential risks. Thus, while most coordination strategies in this book are specific to superintelligence, we hope that some insights yield “collateral benefits” for the reduction of other existential risks, by creating an overall civilizational framework that increases robustness, resiliency, and antifragility.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Southern African Conference on Artificial Intelligence Research, SACAIR 2020, held in Muldersdrift, South Africa, in February 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the SACAIR 2020 has been postponed to February 2021. The 19 papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. They are organized on the topical sections on AI for ethics and society; AI in information systems, AI for development and social good; applications of AI; knowledge representation and reasoning; machine learning theory.
While being rooted in the academic discourse, The Things That Really Matter comprehensively explores the most fundamental aspects of human life in an accessible, non-technical language, adding fresh perspectives and new arguments and considerations that are designed to stimulate further debate and, in some cases, a deliberate redirection of research interests in the respective areas. It features a series of conversations about the things in our life that we all, in one way or another, wrestle with if we are at all concerned about what kind of world we live in and what our role in it is: things like birth, age, and death, good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of the self and the role...
Noise, as we usually think of it, is background sound that interferes with our ability to hear more interesting sounds. In general terms, though, it is anything that interferes with the reception of signals of any sort. It includes extraneous energy in the environment, degradation of signals in transit, and spontaneous random activity in receivers and signalers. Whatever the cause, the consequence of noise is error by receivers, and these errors are the key to understanding how noise shapes the evolution of communication. Noise Matters breaks new ground in the scientific understanding of how communication evolves in the presence of noise. Combining insights of signal detection theory with ev...
MIND-UPLOADING: the process of transferring one’s mind from the brain to a new substrate, generally a computer. It is the stuff of science fiction, immediately recognizable in contemporary literature and cinema. However, it has also become increasingly respectable—or at least approachable—within technological, neurological, and philosophical circles. This book begins with a rich taxonomy of hypothetical procedures by which mind-uploading might be achieved, even if only in the realm of thought experiment. This is likely the most thorough collection of such procedures yet compiled and should form the basis of any reader’s personal philosophy of mind and mind-uploading. It then offers o...
Transplant practices are discussed in the medical realm, in fictional texts and in popular advertisement. Yet how do these sectors intersect and influence each other? How can the accounts of surgeons invested in transplant practice be brought into conversation with fictional voices? Future T/Issues positions transplantation at the intersection of natural science and the humanities and adds to the discussion of organ transplantation by focusing on one specific aspect that is commonly overlooked: the idea of speculation. By engaging with speculative fiction in conversation with life writing, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of transplantation as a cultural practice, showcasing t...
This book, through the lens of interdisciplinary legal analysis, draws a subtle balance between bioethics and financial regulation, with the latter playing an unexpectedly crucial role in the way life may potentially be governed. The legal topic of human preservation or cryoconservation was initially developed in the United States in the case of Donaldson v. van de Kamp. More recently, the subject arose in Europe as a result of a decision of the High Court, Family Division, London. This new theme of cryoconservation has unfolded through multifaceted forms, including its impact on regulation. In an area that may, at least prima facie, be regarded as belonging to the traditional realm of medic...
Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the number of giraffes in the world. We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small? With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is...
Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks. Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. ...