Emergent modularity and safety

📖 Description

Biological neural networks (i.e. brains) and artificial neural networks have sufficient commonalities that it's often reasonable to treat our knowledge about one as a good starting point for reasoning about the other. So one way to predict how the field of neural network interpretability will develop is by looking at how neuroscience interprets the workings of human brains. I think there are several interesting things to be learned from this, but the one I'll focus on in this post is the concept of *modularity*: the fact that different parts of the brain carry out different functions. Neuroscientists have mapped many different skills (such as language use, memory consolidation, and emotional responses) to specific brain regions. Note that this doesn't always give us much direct insight into how the skills themselves work - but it does make follow-up research into those skills much easier. I'll argue that, for the purposes of AGI safety, this type of understanding may also directly e...

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🔗 Sources

• [1] https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/zvEbeZ6opjPJiQnFE/emergent-modularity-and-safety