Communication at the Center
Jeremy Helm
June 20, 2020
The presentation intervenes in the future technological development of Artificial General Intelligence and the feasibility of alignment. This future is one of great unknowns and risk. Instead, I’ll specify an approach of reconfiguring known technologies, often in the footsteps of largely unused designs, to build stability and resilience by resolving new and long existing conflicts and problems. Yes, this should occur as an extraordinary claim - exchanging risk and scarcity for effectiveness, uncertainty with immediate real world benefits.
JEREMY HELM A background of concern for existential risk has shaped half my life. My initial descent into this came from the implicit assessment that “this world just isn’t going to work out” - after learning about the future of technological power and connecting that with an account of historic and present abuses of power.
Being exposed to Nonviolent Communication (as formulated by Marshall Rosenberg) I got the reality that all conflicts happens at the level of strategy - meanwhile we human beings all have the same needs. Failing to make this distinction between our strategies & needs, we’ll hang on to the strategy as if it were the need, and when these inevitable conflict with the strategies of others, they’ll occur for us as enemies. My presentation has developed from the power of this insight.
I live in Santa Cruz, CA, where I moved to work at a community based nonprofit to share the practice of Nonviolent Communication. I’ve contributed a chapter “Structured Listening: Technological design to help humanize humanity” to the book The Future of Text: A 2020 Vision.