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Introducing the Principles of Intelligent Behaviour in Biological and Social Systems (PIBBSS) Fellowship - EA Forum

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Cross-posted to the Alignment Forum/Less Wrong INTRODUCTION How would you go about scientifically studying aliens? Arik Kershenbaum’s The Zoologist Guide to The Galaxy proposes to use evolutionary thinking to uncover constraints on how alien species could evolve. One of his most interesting points is that evolution constrains function far more than form, because function depends significantly less on the details of the environment. Hence we should expect crisper answers to “How would aliens behave?” than “What would aliens look like?”. And in the course of his book, he gives the best answer he can find to the former question. So when confronted with the question of how to study something he couldn’t gather data on, Kershenbaum leveraged analogies to biological systems he could and had studied, and the underlying constraints brought on by the mechanisms of natural selection. On a completely unrelated note, the new summer fellowship Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems (PIBBSS) (funded by the LTFF) aims at creating valuable AI alignment research through studying analogies to many complex systems (evolution, brains, language, social structures…). Fellows will have graduate research experience in fields studying such systems, working on a concrete alignment project in collaboration with an established alignment researcher. The fellowship will run during all of Summer 2022. The point of this post is to introduce this fellowship, explain the reasoning behind it and give more concrete details about how it will go. Note that I’m not an organizer of this fellowship, I’m just assisting with the writing of this post; credits for the ideas and arguments should go to Nora Ammann and TJ, the organizers of the fellowship. ANALOGIES AS GENERAL EPISTEMIC STRATEGIES FOR ALIGNMENT As I’ve written elsewhere, alignment cannot directly leverage most epistemic strategies and approaches used in Science and Engineering, because it’s about solving a probl

Peter Slattery 🔸 4y 7 0 0 Thanks for this interesting post! I am probably not well-suited to apply for the fellowship. However, I was interested in the ideas you mentioned, so I wanted to share some ideas I had regardless. They might not be useful, but it was helpful for me to get them out of my head! Behaviour science I work in this space, and much of the theory seems very relevant to understanding non-human agents. For instance, I wonder there would be value in exploring if models of human behaviour such as COM-B and the FBM could be useful in modelling the actions of AI agents. For instanc

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