# What are important UI-shaped problems that Lightcone could tackle?

As I think about "what to do about AI x-risk?", some principles that seem useful to me:

1.  Short timelines seem plausible enough that, **for the next year or so, I'd like to focus on plans that are relevant if takeoff begins in the next few years**. In a year, if it looks more like there are some fundamental bottlenecks on true creative thinking, I may consider more projects that only payoff in longer-timeline stories.
2.  Given "short timelines", I feel most optimistic on plans that capitalize on skills that I'm already good at (but maybe multiclassing at things that I can learn quickly with LLM assistance).
3.  I think "UI design" is a skill that I (and Lightcone more broadly) am pretty good at. And, I believe the [Interfaces as a Scarce Resource](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hyShz2ABiKX56j5tJ/interfaces-as-a-scarce-resource) hypothesis – the world is often bottlenecked on ability to process and make-use-of information in complicated, messy domains.

(In addition to LessWrong, the Lightcone team has worked on the S-Process, which makes it much easier for grantmakers to argue and negotiate pretty complex positions about how much they value various orgs).

If I've got a UI-shaped hammer, what are some nails that seem like they need doing? (In particular, that are somehow relevant to x-risk)

Some thoughts so far
====================

**Cyborgism**

Last fall, I was oriented around building good UI for LLM-assisted-thinking. 

In addition to it generally seeming like a fruitful green field, I had a specific hypothesis that, once LLMs Get Real Gud, there will be an important distinction between "being able to get useful work out of them given a minute's work, and, being able to get useful work out of them of them in <5 seconds." The latter is something that can become a true "part of your exobrain." The former is still more like a tool you're using.

I'm less bullish on that now because, while I think most people aren't quite tackling this with the particular taste I'd apply, it does sure seem like everyone is working on "do stuff with LLMs" and it's not where the underpicked fruit is.

**"Schleppy work" in narrow, technical domains**

It seems like there may be narrow, technical domains specific narrow domains, where there's some kinds of tasks that rarely get done because they're too hard to think about –you need tons of context, the context is littered around various places. Or, maybe it's all technically in one place but you have to sift through a lot of extraneous details.

A past example of this would be "hoverovers in coding IDEs for types and docs", linters, etc. The ability to right-click on a function call to go to the original implementation of the function. 

For a less technical example: spellchecking and grammarchecking in word processor docs.

A possible (current, important) example might be "something something Mech Interp a la Chris Olah's earlier work on distill.pub". I don't actually know how Mech Interp works these days, I vaguely believe there are visualizers/heat maps for neurons, but I'm not sure how useful those actually are for the kinds of analysis that are most important.

An example John Wentworth has mentioned a couple times is "automatically generating examples of your abstractions and making sure they type-check." (This involves both UI, and some deep technical work to actually verify the type checking)

**What kinds of markets need to exist, that are difficult because of evaluation or reputation or (cognitive) transaction costs?**

It's sort of surprising that Amazon, Uber or Lugg work. Why aren't people receiving [bobcats](https://xkcd.com/325/) when they order a stapler all the time? A large part of the answer are rating systems, and an ecosystem where it's not trivial to build up a reputation. 

What are some places where you can't easily buy or find a thing because of adversarial optimization? 

...
===

With those illustrative examples: do you work on x-risk or x-risk adjacent things? What are some places in your work where it's confusing or annoying to find things, or figure things out?