Gideon Futerman's Quick takes

By Gideon Futerman @ 2025-03-02T14:26 (+6)

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Gideon Futerman @ 2025-03-02T14:26 (+18)

I wish more work focused on digital minds really focused on answering the following questions, rather than merely investigating how plausible it is that digital minds similar to current day AI's could be sentient:

  1. What does good sets of scenarios for post-AGI governance need to look like to create good/avoid terrible (or whatever normative focus we want) futures, assuming digital minds are the dominant moral patients going into the future 1a) How does this differ dependent on what sorts of things can be digital minds eg whether sentient AIs are likely to happen 'by accident' by creating useful AIs (including ASI systems or sub-systems) vs whether sentient AIs have to be delibrately built? How do we deal with this trade off?

  2. Which of these good sets of scenarios need certain actions to be taken pre-ASI development (actions beyond simply ensuring we don't all die)? Therefore, what actions would we ideally take now to help bring about such good futures? This includes, in my view, what, if any, thicker concept of alignment than 'intent alignment' ought we to use.

  3. Given the strategic, political, geopolitical and technological situation we are in, how, if at all, can we make concrete progress to this? We obviously can't just 'do research' and hope this solves everything. Rather, we ought to use this to guide specific actions that can have impact. I guess this step feels rather hard to do without 1 and 2, but also, as far as I can tell, no one is really doing this?

I'm sure someone has expressed this same set of questions elsewhere, but i've not seen them yet, and at least to me, seem pretty neglected and important

Ryan Greenblatt @ 2025-03-05T18:08 (+6)

I think work of the sort you're discussing isn't typically called digital minds work. I would just describe this as "trying to ensure better futures (from a scope-sensitive longtermist perspective) other than via avoiding AI takeover, human power grabs, or extinction (from some other source)".

This just incidentally ends up being about digital entities/beings/value because that's where the vast majority of the value probably lives.


The way you phrase (1) seems to imply that you think large fractions of expected moral value (in the long run) will be in the minds of laborers (AIs we created to be useful) rather than things intentionally created to provide value/disvalue. I'm skeptical.

Bradford Saad @ 2025-03-06T01:58 (+3)

I'd also like to see more work on digital minds macrostrategy questions such as 1-3. To that end, I'll take this opportunity to mention that the Future Impact Group is accepting applications for projects on digital minds (among other topics) through EoD on March 8 for its part-time fellowship program. I'm set to be a project lead for the upcoming cohort and would welcome applications from people who'd want to work with me on a digital minds macrostrategy project. (I suggest some possible projects here but am open to others.) 

I think the other project leads listed for AI sentience are all great and would highly recommend applying to work with any of them on a digital minds project (though I'm unsure if any of them are open to macrostrategy projects).