>effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there
It's probably impossible, or it may only be possible in hindsight which means it's already too late.
If for example you make an entity smarter than you all you can do is hope it will be safe. Any entity smarter than you has more freedom of choice of actions than you do, or at least the ability to explore them. A common example here would be a 2D entity trying to contain a 3D entity. The 3D entity can simply rise up and over any line you draw to stop it.
And that's for cases where intelligence has a will to break out of it's box. It doesn't even need that. Instrumental convergence can sit around and build solutions until one of them passes the "don't do bad things" classifier.
And lastly, you're assuming that models will remain expensive to train well into the future. If the cost drops significantly you can expect someone to develop an intelligent but completely unhinged model at some point. And it may even be AI itself that creates it. There is no natural evolution that occurs that natively makes safe models.
It's probably impossible, or it may only be possible in hindsight which means it's already too late.
If for example you make an entity smarter than you all you can do is hope it will be safe. Any entity smarter than you has more freedom of choice of actions than you do, or at least the ability to explore them. A common example here would be a 2D entity trying to contain a 3D entity. The 3D entity can simply rise up and over any line you draw to stop it.
And that's for cases where intelligence has a will to break out of it's box. It doesn't even need that. Instrumental convergence can sit around and build solutions until one of them passes the "don't do bad things" classifier.
And lastly, you're assuming that models will remain expensive to train well into the future. If the cost drops significantly you can expect someone to develop an intelligent but completely unhinged model at some point. And it may even be AI itself that creates it. There is no natural evolution that occurs that natively makes safe models.