LW - Talk: ”AI Would Be A Lot Less Alarming If We Understood Agents” by johnswentworth

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Talk: "AI Would Be A Lot Less Alarming If We Understood Agents", published by johnswentworth on December 18, 2023 on LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for a talk I gave this past summer for the ALIFE conference. If you haven't heard of it before, ALIFE (short for "artificial life") is a subfield of biology which... well, here are some of the session titles from day 1 of the conference to give the gist:
Cellular Automata, Self-Reproduction and Complexity
Evolving Robot Bodies and Brains in Unity
Self-Organizing Systems with Machine Learning
Untangling Cognition: How Information Theory can Demystify Brains
... so you can see how this sort of crowd might be interested in AI alignment.
Rory Greig and Simon McGregor definitely saw how such a crowd might be interested in AI alignment, so they organized an alignment workshop at the conference.
I gave this talk as part of that workshop. The stated goal of the talk was to "nerd-snipe ALIFE researchers into working on alignment-relevant questions of agency". It's pretty short (~20 minutes), and aims for a general energy of "hey here's some cool research hooks".
If you want to nerd-snipe technical researchers into thinking about alignment-relevant questions of agency, this talk is a short and relatively fun one to share.
Thankyou to Rory and Simon for organizing, and thankyou to Rory for getting the video posted publicly.
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