> You cannot look at an air catastrophe and retrospectively say "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, therefore if we correct failures X, Y, and Z, we would have been okay."
That's literally exactly what air safety researchers do in an air disaster. There is a famous saying along the lines of "Air travel regulations are written in blood", meaning that all the regulations we have now are a result of fixing issues that led to previous disasters piece-by-piece.
> The takeaway is "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, which necessarily happened in an environment of failures X_0 through Z_10x10^10, and so therefore patching X, Y, and Z would be insufficient to address overall risks of the system."
Yes, I 100% agree with this. But I think that's what the author of the article was saying as well:
> That report had one key new piece of information, and some good prosaic steps OpenAI will be taking to strengthen its alignment, training, supervision, infrastructure and incident response.
> Mostly it confirmed what we already knew. The questions we most wanted answers to, that we did not already know, were mostly not answered. There was a distinct lack of self-reflection, especially about decision making and safety culture, and about the approach to alignment. I came away disappointed.
I.e. the "prosaic steps" are just the "fix X/Y/Z" as you point out. But what is needed is a more fundamental rethinking around stuff like safety culture, monitoring, and even things like better research into how agents do decision making in the first place.
That's literally exactly what air safety researchers do in an air disaster. There is a famous saying along the lines of "Air travel regulations are written in blood", meaning that all the regulations we have now are a result of fixing issues that led to previous disasters piece-by-piece.
> The takeaway is "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, which necessarily happened in an environment of failures X_0 through Z_10x10^10, and so therefore patching X, Y, and Z would be insufficient to address overall risks of the system."
Yes, I 100% agree with this. But I think that's what the author of the article was saying as well:
> That report had one key new piece of information, and some good prosaic steps OpenAI will be taking to strengthen its alignment, training, supervision, infrastructure and incident response.
> Mostly it confirmed what we already knew. The questions we most wanted answers to, that we did not already know, were mostly not answered. There was a distinct lack of self-reflection, especially about decision making and safety culture, and about the approach to alignment. I came away disappointed.
I.e. the "prosaic steps" are just the "fix X/Y/Z" as you point out. But what is needed is a more fundamental rethinking around stuff like safety culture, monitoring, and even things like better research into how agents do decision making in the first place.