SYDNEY SUPERINTELLIGENCE
========================

A meetup in Sydney for people who think losing control of our future
to AI is the problem of our time, and who want to work on it.


THE FUTURE WE'RE HURTLING TOWARDS
---------------------------------

There are two broad ways humanity could lose control of its future to
AI. Neither requires a villain. Both follow from incentives that are
already in motion.

Rogue AI agents

  - Systems end up pursuing goals we never intended. Someone gives
    them harmful goals, we specify the goal wrong, they learn the
    wrong one, or they drift once deployed.
  - We are handing them more autonomy and more capability every year,
    which leaves us less able to notice when this happens and less
    able to correct it.
  - At the extreme end, this is existential.

Loss of human labour value

  - People stop being needed: as workers, as taxpayers, and as the
    soldiers and officials who can refuse an order.
  - That need has always been ordinary people's leverage. It is the
    reason anyone at the top has to care what they think.
  - Remove it and nobody has to decide to abandon the public. Firms
    buy the cheaper substitute, states follow the revenue, and every
    headline number looks healthy the whole way down.


PURPOSE
-------

We believe this is the defining problem of our time, and that it is
too important to leave to any one field.

Most people treat it as either too vague to act on or already decided.
We think both are wrong. We meet to bring the sharpest policy makers,
economists, engineers and lawyers into one room and take the problem
apart.


GOALS
-----

  1. A structured taxonomy of the risks.
     Split one ambiguous fear into distinct problems, each with a
     clear definition, so we can tell them apart and stop arguing
     past each other.

  2. Cause and effect behind each risk.
     Trace every risk from what is true today, through the
     assumptions that carry it forward, to the outcome. Every
     assumption is a place the chain could break.

  3. A Swiss cheese model, built with experts.
     No single safeguard stops every failure. Map the layers of
     defence (technical, legal, economic, institutional), find the
     holes in each, and find where the holes line up.

The taxonomy says what can go wrong. The chains say how it happens.
The Swiss cheese model says where we can stop it.


WHO WE WANT
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  - Policy makers, economists, software engineers and lawyers.
  - Anyone with deep expertise in one of the layers of defence, even
    if you have never thought about AI.
  - People willing to argue about specific mechanisms rather than
    general optimism or doom.

You do not need an AI background. You do need to be willing to change
your mind.


NOT SET IN STONE
----------------

None of this is inevitable. Everything above is a trajectory, not a
destination, and trajectories can be changed.

Every chain from here to there runs through choices that people have
not made yet: what gets built, who owns it, what the law allows, and
what we decide to measure. Each of those choices is a place to step in.

We are also early. The handful of chokepoints that make this dangerous
are the same ones that make it governable, and they will not stay open
forever. The people who understand the problem now can still shape how
it goes.

Humanity has bent powerful technologies towards the public good
before. We think it can again, if the right people start working on it
while there is still time.


GET IN TOUCH
------------

Leave your email and we'll tell you about the first meetup:

  https://sydneysuperintelligence.com/join