Making AI x-risk an accessible and non-politicized object of concern among engineering students and the general public.
Making AI x-risk an accessible and non-politicized object of concern among engineering students and the general public.
I began developing a course on x-risk from AI as a postdoc at Stanford in 2024 (partly funded by Manifund; Ryan Kidd). I've been cooperating with people at SERI (the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative) to understand AI x-risk. I'm talking to the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm to get a personal view of this landscape's historical trajectory since ca 2000 as told by Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom's long-time collaborator at Oxford FHI. Sandberg is an affiliate of the IFFS.
The goal is to expand the course to include exercises for how students can help solving this problem (as engineers, as young people) as well as introduce course elements that help them reason about how this problelm is different from other existential risks (nuclear, bio, climate, pandemic...)..
The output will be in the form of expanded course materials; effectively a new syllabus.
AI x-risk is often written off without understanding its nature.
Or, it is endorsed by groups already committed to its perspectives.
The result: dysfunctional/non-optimal buy-in on the importance of the topic from new actors/outsiders.
This is what I want to change: make sure people understand what's at stake and what they can do.
I sit in a very privileged position to make this happen: teaching the history of tech and computing at the top Nordic engineering school: KTH.
This kind of risk should be neither written off nor fully endorsed until you've seen how complicated the landscape really is. In other words: give audiences whose lives are changed by AI – many of whom will themselves be agents of change in the AI engineering space – a solid background on the concept of AI x-risk.
My angle: Place AI x-risk in a deep historical context. Very few people in academia, industry, and government have solid knowledge of the history of AI x-risk. This is where I can make a difference.
How? De-politicize the concept and focus on the fascinating thinking that has been done in this space for more than 150 years. Help people outside of EA, rationalism, and AI Safety to get a more nuanced view.
Team Member
8K: The funds will buy me 2 months of work to redesign the existing coursework for the expanded course on AI x-risk (syllabus build-out, student exercises).
15K: I can do online recordings and publish lectures on the web for Nordic audiences, accessible outside of universities.
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