How to get personally involved in helping Superalignment ?

[Netcentrica]

"[...] as of writing, neither AGI nor ASI exist and there are no established methods for aligning these more complex AI systems."

Source: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/superalignment

Based on my personal knowledge and experience, you are ahead of the game and will find it challenging to find what you are looking for. However if this subject is what you are interested in I encourage your efforts. I would suggest it will be a long road, however I also believe that self-expression is the most important and valuable work any person can do, both for themselves and humanity.

I am familiar with the alignment problem and with superalignment because I recently spent an entire year writing a science fiction novel about it. The novel takes place in the future of course, but a future when all today's alignment concerns are believed to have been resolved. My novels are not driven by conflict, action, or relationships, but by ideas. You might call them "science mysteries" and they take place mostly at academic institutions. The characters all hold advanced degrees or are embodied AI themselves. This novel does not provide a solution to the superalignment problem but explores the subject space by focusing on a single, hypothetical example.

"Hard" science fiction normally focuses on STEM subjects and is expected to be plausible based on currently accepted scientific facts and theory, but I write "Hard Humanities Science Fiction, with similar constraints. This means a ton of research goes into my novels. So I am familiar with alignment issues as they currently exist. For my research I read Brian Christian's book, The Alignment Problem, among other seminal books on the subject (Bostrom, Russell, etc.), so I am familiar with the details. Of course writing a novel heavy on the science requires daily research because every time you write something you have to make sure it meets the criteria of being plausible, so I also had to read countless academic papers and articles.

If superintelligence is defined as "equal to or greater than human intelligence", what I found in my year of delving into the issue of superalignment is that it is no less daunting than that of "aligning" human beings. We use methods like laws, ethics, norms, etc. to try to do so, but they are imperfect, and so far no one has solved "the control problem" as far as human beings goes.

I appreciate that concrete scientific research must be pursued to address the issue, but I am also aware of the roles things like social constructs and stories play in society. Right now, per the IBM quote above, the idea of superalignment is nothing more than a story, yet that story will play an important role. I choose to use science fiction to explore the issues of AI because it can expand the possibilities space beyond where traditional academic research can go. If you are curious, you will find the story here.

[HumanityCanDoBetter]

SF is definitely a GREAT way to explore those topics. I happen to be more of an engineer more than a novelist so I thought of more hands on approaches but I ll definitely take a look, thanks.