Barriers to a Prosperous Future

The current race towards producing general artificial intelligence systems brings with it severe risks, yet no AI company developing frontier models is addressing these risks at a level proportional to the pace of development. The rapid integration of this poorly-understood technology into nearly all aspects of society is precarious at best, and catastrophic at worst. If progress trends continue, we will need a monumental level of investment in enhancing our robustness to these risks in the coming years. What follows is a summary of my understanding of these risks, a description of those most concerning to me, and finally what my personal plans are to mitigate them.Types of RiskIt can be useful to categorize risks from advanced AI into three broad categories: misuse, misalignment, and systemic. Misuse refers to malicious actors—individuals, groups, or states—being enabled by AI systems to achieve nefarious objectives, by, for example, generating personalized misinformation at scale, hacking their adversaries' critical infrastructure, or building powerful weapons. Misalignment refers to AI models failing to truly obtain human values, leading to unpredictable and undesirable behaviours in out-of-distribution environments. Finally, systemic risks are those that arise from our complex and vital societal systems becoming dependent on a technology which we don't fully understand nor control, leaving us vulnerable to their unpredictable interactions.Even AI researchers themselves understand shockingly little of how frontier AI systems reason and make decisions, and the rate of progress in this area is worryingly slow compared to the pace of development of AI capabilities, which is currently estimated to be doubling every 7 months, or less. [1]As for "aligning" models with human values, the best techniques these multi-billion dollar companies have developed are fundamentally surface-level and have, without exception, failed in various ways, including being bypassed by cleve