Input to UN Interim Report on Governing AI for Humanity

This document was written by Bradford Saad, with assistance from Andreas Mogensen and Jeff Sebo. Jakob Lohmar provided valuable research assistance. The document benefited from discussion with or feedback from Frankie Andersen-Wood, Adam Bales, Ondrej Bajgar, Thomas Houlden, Jojo Lee, Toby Ord, Teruji Thomas, Elliott Thornley and Eva Vivalt.

Other papers

Welfare and felt duration – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. …

Funding public projects: A case for the Nash product rule – Florian Brandl (Stanford University), Felix Brandt (Technische Universität München), Dominik Peters (University of Oxford), Christian Stricker (Technische Universität München) and Warut Suksompong (National University of Singapore)

We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. This serves as a model for public expenditure without an exogenously available budget, such as participatory budgeting or voluntary tax programs, as well as donor coordination when interpreting charities as public projects and donations as contributions. Our aim is to identify a mutually beneficial distribution of the individual contributions. …

On two arguments for Fanaticism – Jeffrey Sanford Russell (University of Southern California)

Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? Fanaticism says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better.