AI Safety Agendas

A map of the AI safety field's problems and agendas, and a request for your ratings We built aisafetyagendas.com , an interactive map of AI safety research agendas and how they map to different problems in alignment. The rows are 12 core problems, the columns are research areas, and inside you can find 58 research agendas. Each cell is the intersection of a problem and an area: the number tells you how many agendas target that problem, the colour tells you how mature they are. We did a first pass ourselves, using our own judgement, but the first pass is not the point. Figure 1: The Map at aisafetyagendas.com The point is that every cell is a question aimed back at the community: is this rating right? You can rate the cells in your area, tell us how familiar you are with it, and read the map as best case, average, or worst case depending on how optimistic you feel. It was built as part of the Safe AI Germany Incubator. Figure 2: From left to right best, average and worst case rating examples. The allocation problem The field cannot see its own resource allocation. Leech and Lynn put it as: "you can't optimise an allocation of resources if you don't know what the current one is". Wentworth goes further, arguing that the memetically successful strategy is to work on easy problems rather than "plausible bottlenecks to humanity's survival". The IAPS Expert Survey gets to a similar place from another direction, warning that funders and researchers concentrate on the most visible w…