# Recent AI safety work

(Crossposted from [ordinary ideas](http://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/)). 

I’ve recently been thinking about AI safety, and some of the writeups might be interesting to some LWers:

1.  Ideas for building useful agents without goals: [approval-directed agents](https://medium.com/@paulfchristiano/model-free-decisions-6e6609f5d99e), [approval-directed bootstrapping](https://medium.com/@paulfchristiano/approval-directed-bootstrapping-5d49e886c14f), and [optimization and goals](https://medium.com/@paulfchristiano/optimization-and-goals-ca524f745852). I think this line of reasoning is very promising.
2.  A formalization of one piece of the AI safety challenge: [the steering problem](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ggFw8KbvW77Z3gCQUDyz3_IrR3pVyFZ2wkuBgMvoVU/edit?usp=sharing). I am eager to see more precise, high-level discussion of AI safety, and I think this article is a helpful step in that direction. Since articulating the steering problem I have become much more optimistic about versions of it being solved in the near term. This mostly means that the steering problem fails to capture the hardest parts of AI safety. But it’s still good news, and I think it may eventually cause some people to revise their understanding of AI safety.
3.  Some ideas for getting useful work out of self-interested agents, based on arguments: [of arguments and wagers](https://medium.com/@paulfchristiano/of-arguments-and-wagers-ee16a0e84cf7), [adversarial collaboration](http://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/adversarial-collaboration/) \[older\], and [delegating to a mixed crowd](https://medium.com/@paulfchristiano/delegating-to-a-mixed-crowd-dda2b8e22cd8). I think these are interesting ideas in an interesting area, but they have a ways to go until they could be useful.

I’m excited about a few possible next steps:

1.  Under the (highly improbable) assumption that various deep learning architectures could yield human-level performance, could they also predictably yield safe AI? I think we have a good chance of finding a solution---i.e. a design of plausibly safe AI, under roughly the same assumptions needed to get human-level AI---for some possible architectures. This would feel like a big step forward.
2.  For what capabilities can we solve the steering problem? I had originally assumed none, but I am now interested in trying to apply the ideas from the approval-directed agents post. From easiest to hardest, I think there are natural lines of attack using any of: natural language question answering, precise question answering, sequence prediction. It might even be possible using reinforcement learners (though this would involve different techniques).
3.  I am very interested in implementing effective debates, and am keen to test some unusual proposals. The connection to AI safety is more impressionistic, but in my mind these techniques are closely linked with approval-directed behavior.
4.  I’m currently writing up a concrete architecture for approval-directed agents, in order to facilitate clearer discussion about the idea. This kind of work that seems harder to do in advance, but at this point I think it’s mostly an exposition problem.