News and links

• “The Off-Switch Game“: Dylan Hadfield-Manell, Anca Dragan, Pieter Abbeel, and Stuart Russell show that an AI agent’s corrigibility is closely tied to the uncertainty it has about its utility function.
• Russell and Allan Dafoe critique an inaccurate summary by Oren Etzioni of a new survey of AI experts on superintelligence.
• Sam Harris interviews Russell on the basics of AI risk (video). See also Russell’s new Q&A on the future of AI.
• Future of Life Institute co-founder Viktoriya Krakovna and FHI researcher Jan Leike join Google DeepMind’s safety team.
• GoodAI sponsors a challenge to “accelerate the search for general artificial intelligence”.
• OpenAI releases Universe, “a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games”. Meanwhile, DeepMind has open-sourced their own platform for general AI research, DeepMind Lab.
• Staff at GiveWell and the Centre for Effective Altruism, along with others in the effective altruism community, explain where they’re donating this year.
• FHI is seeking AI safety interns, researchers, and admins: jobs page.

This newsletter was originally posted here.