Instead of technical research, more people should focus on buying time

I think I have one intuition that strongly agrees with you. I have another (more quantitative) intuition that strongly disagrees, which roughly goes:

1. There aren't that many alignment researchers. Last estimate I heard was maybe 300 total?
2. Many people are trying to advance AI capabilities. Maybe 30k total?

3. Naively, buying time interventions is 100x less efficient on average. So your comparative advantage for buying time must be really strong, to the tune of thinking you're 100x better at helping to buy time than doing technical AGI safety research, for the math to work out.

I'm probably missing something, but I notice myself being confused. How do I reconcile these two intuitions?

Why call it "buying time" instead of "persuading AI researchers"? That seems to be the direct target of efforts here, and the primary benefit seems better conceptualised as "AI researchers act in a way more aligned with what AI safety people think is appropriate" rather than "buying time" which is just one of the possible consequences.

Crossposting from LW

Here is a sceptical take: anyone who is prone to getting convinced by this post to switch to attempts at “buying time” interventions from attempts at do technical AI safety is pretty likely not a good fit to try any high-powered buying-time interventions. 

The whole thing reads a bit like "AI governance" and "AI strategy" reinvented under a different name, seemingly without bothering to understand what's the current understanding.

Figuring out that AI strategy and governance are maybe important, in late 2022, after spending substantial time on AI safety,  does not seem to be what I would expect from promising AI strategists. Apparent lack of coordination with people already working in this area does not seem like a promising sign from people who would like to engage with hard coordination problems.

Also, I'm worried about suggestions like 

Concretely, we think that roughly 80% of alignment researchers are working on directly solving alignment. We think that roughly 50% should be working on alignment, while 50% should be reallocated toward buying time.

We also think that roughly 90% of (competent) community-builders are focused on “typical community-building” (designed to get more alignment researchers). We think that roughly 70% should do typical community-building, and 30% should be buying time.

...could be easily counterproductive.

What is and would be really valuable are people who understand both the so-called "technical problem" and the so-called "strategy problem".  (secretly, they have more in common than people think)

What is not only not valuable, but easily harmful, would be an influx of people who understand neither,  but engage with the strategy domain instead of technical domain.  

Multiplier effects: Delaying timelines by 1 year gives the entire alignment community an extra year to solve the problem. 

This is the most and fastest I've updated on a single sentence as far back as I can remember. Probably the most important thing I've ever read on the EA forum. I am deeply gratefwl for learning this, and it's definitely worth Taking Seriously. Hoping to look into it in January unless stuff gets in the way.

(Update: I'm much substantially less optimistic about time-buying than I was when I wrote this comment, but I still think it's high priority to look into.)

I have one objection to claim 3a, however: Buying-time interventions are plausibly more heavy-tailed than alignment research in some cases because 1) the bottleneck for buying time is social influence and 2) social influence follows a power law due to preferential attachment. Luckily, the traits that make for top alignment researchers have limited (but not insignificant) overlap with the traits that make for top social influencers. So I think top alignment researchers should still not switch in most cases on the margin.

jskatt @ 2022-11-06T07:34 (+1)

Can you be more specific about "the bottleneck for buying time is social influence"?

Emrik @ 2022-11-06T09:56 (+2)

I basically agree with this breakdown from the post:

How do you account for the fact that the impact of a particular contribution to object-level alignment research can compound over time?

1. Let's say I have a technical alignment idea now that is both hard to learn and very usefwl, such that every recipient of it does alignment research a little more efficiently. But it takes time before that idea disseminates across the community.
   1. At first, only a few people bother to learn it sufficiently to understand that it's valuable. But every person that does so adds to the total strength of the signal that tells the rest of the community that they should prioritise learning this.
   2. Not sure if this is the right framework, but let's say that researchers will only bother learning it if the strength of the signal hits their person-specific threshold for prioritising it.
   3. Number of researchers are normally distributed (or something) over threshold height, and the strength of the signal starts out below the peak of the distribution.
   4. Then (under some assumptions about the strength of individual signals and the distribution of threshold height), every learner that adds to the signal will, at first, attract more than one learner that adds to the signal, until the signal passes the peak of the distribution and the idea reaches satiation/fixation in the community.
2. If something like the above model is correct, then the impact of alignment research plausibly goes down over time.
   1. But the same is true of a lot of time-buying work (like outreach). I don't know how to balance this, but I am now a little more skeptical of the relative value of buying time.
3. Importantly, this is not the same as "outreach". Strong technical alignment ideas are most likely incompatible with almost everyone outside the community, so the idea doesn't increase the number of people working on alignment.

I would push back a little, the main thing is that buying time interventions obviously have significant sign uncertainty. Eg. your graph on median researcher "buying time" vs technical alignment, I think should have very wide error at the low end of "buying time", going significantly below 0 within the 95% confidence interval. Technical alignment is lots less risky to that extent.

Thank you so much for your excellent post on the strategy of buying time, Thomas, Akash, and Olivia! I strongly agree that this strategy is necessary, neglected, and tractable.

For practical ideas of how to achieve this (and a productive debate in the comments section of the risks from low-quality outreach efforts), please see my related earlier forum post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/juhMehg89FrLX9pTj/a-grand-strategy-to-recruit-ai-capabilities-researchers-into

Interesting. Have not read; only skimmed and bookmarked. But one of my initial naive reactions to the framing is that I have more or less always viewed technical safety work that is ‘aimed’ relatively near term as a form of buying time (I’m thinking of pretty much all work that is aimed at AI via the ML/DL paradigm, eg alignment work that is explicitly stuff to do with big transformers etc) .

1. What does it mean to buy "end time"? If an action results in a world with longer timelines, then what does it mean to say that the additional time comes "later"?
2. What is "serial alignment research"? I'm struggling to distinguish it from "alignment research."
3. Can you clarify the culture change you want to see? We should think of buying time as "better" than "(traditional) technical AI safety research and (traditional) community-building"?

Less-important comments:

• Can you be more specific about "ODA+"? Does it include Meta and Google Brain, or only the most safety-conscious labs?
• I'm confused why field building isn't listed as one of the key benefits other than buying time. Publishing more work like the goal misgeneralization paper would make field building more successful.
• In the graph ("Figure 1"), I'm parsing "technical alignment" as "technical research on the core challenges of alignment that avoids shortening timelines," because the impact of talented researchers depends heavily on the projects they pursue.
• PaLM would have been just as fast if they chose not to publish the PaLM paper. (The sentence about PaLM is confusing.)

Naively, the main argument (imo) can be summed up as:

If I am capable of doing an average amount of alignment work $\overline{x}$ per unit time, and I have $n$ units of time available before the development of transformative AI, I will have contributed $\overline{x}\ast n$ work. But if I expect to delay transformative AI by $m$ units of time if I focus on it, everyone will have that additional time to do alignment work, which means my impact is $\overline{x}\ast m\ast p$, where $p$ is the number of people doing work. If $m\ast p>n$, I should be focusing on buying time.^[1]

This analysis further favours time-buying if the total amount of work per unit time accelerates, which is plausibly the case if e.g. the alignment community increases over time.

1. ^{^}

   This assumes time-buying and direct alignment-work is independent, whereas I expect doing either will help with the other to some extent.