Announcing the AI Safety Nudge Competition to Help Beat Procrastination

By Marc Carauleanu, Chris Leong @ 2022-10-01T01:49 (+24)

Have you achieved your goal? Fill in this form to be added to the prize draw!

Have you been postponing doing alignment work? Is your learning progressing slower than you'd like? We've had these experiences too, so we've created the AI Safety Nudge competition to help.

You have until the end of October to register your goal and complete it. Then you have until the 7th of November to register completion. We will only accept registrations up to this date.

Pre-register your goal here before you start work.

The AI Safety Nudge Competition aims to encourage people to do things related to AI Safety today instead of procrastinating it into the future by allowing them to enter into a draw if they complete the goal that they set for themselves.

Participants will define a specific goal for themselves, examples include:

• Finish reading Superintelligence

• Finish writing up a relevant blog post

• Organize a local dinner for people interested in AI Safety

If you complete the goal you set out for yourself you will be entered into the draw:

• ten prizes of $100

• two prizes of $100 specifically for Australia and New Zealand

Unfortunately, we cannot include participants from the EU due to local laws.

We are relying on an honor system for the completion of projects. We would prefer if you registered your goal before you started working on it so that we can best learn from this experiment.

We encourage you to pick something for which you need motivation rather than something where it won't make a difference.

To prevent downside risks, certain projects would be excluded including:

• Outreach to famous people, politicians, the media, children, high-net-worth individuals, and top AI researchers

• Projects that could be controversial, come with significant down-side risks, or could produce negative PR

• AI Safety research with high capabilities externalities

For the above kinds of projects, we believe that they should only be pursued after careful consideration rather than under a deadline. Please message chris@aisafetysupport.org if you are uncertain.

Dates

• Applications start the 1st of October
• Participants will have to finish the goal they set out for themselves by the 31st of October, but will have until the 7th Novermber to register a successful completion.
• Winners will be announced by the 14th of November 

Next Steps

Pre-register your goal here before you start work.

Please feel free to share this post with other people you know who need additional motivation to complete an AI Safety related project.

Free book

If you'd like a free book related to AI Safety or Effective Altruism such The Alignment Problem or Super-Intelligence, you can request one here: https://airtable.com/shrZ4FYiyBokPnIZm

Credits: This competition is being produced by Chris Leong (AI Safety Australia and New Zealand) and being implemented by Marc Carauleanu. This project wouldn't be possible without the support of the Long-Term Future Fund or AI Safety Support.

F. A. Q.

How will the winners be selected?

After you completed your goal and submitted the appropriate form, you will be added to a list with all of the participants that did the same, and 10 winners will be selected at random. The same procedure will be repeated but this time there will be a random draw to select 2 winners from the list of participants from Australia and New Zealand. As noted projects with downside risk will be excluded from winning.

Is there a limit on the size of the project?

No, you can start/finish a project related to AI Safety of any size as long as it is doable in a month. If the entire project is difficult to finish in a month, you can state that you want to finish only a part of it during this month. Similarly, the project can be as small as reading one article that you’ve been procrastinating on.

Why do I need to pre-register my project?

We prefer if you register your project before you start on it as we believe this increases the chance this competition causes people to complete their projects and because it also allows us to collect data on the effectiveness of this competition.