Will the project "Feeling machines: Brain-inspired artificial general intelligence" receive receive any funding from the Clearer Thinking Regranting program run by ClearerThinking.org?

Below, you can find some selected quotes from the public copy of the application. The text beneath each heading was written by the applicant. Alternatively, you can click here to see the entire public portion of their application.

Why the applicant thinks we should fund this project

Implementing machines with computational analogues of affective feelings (valence/emotion/moods) present unique challenges to AI safety that are currently underrepresented and not well understood. This project should be funded to increase awareness and understanding of this area of AI alignment research, and to foster more research in AI alignment that connects directly to work in computational neuroscience.

Project Activities

The project involves translating academic literature on how aspects of mentality underwrite general intelligence, and the implications of this for AI safety, into a maximally accessible and didactic format (mostly, long-read posts for the Alignment Forum).

The first step is to make existing academic research (including my own) on how self-modelling serves adaptive and intelligent behaviour in biological agents accessible for a broad readership in the alignment community. This part of the project identifies the role played by affective feelings in facilitating domain-general intelligence. Specifically, this part of the project will consider key factors identified by AI researchers as lacking in current systems, and provide an account of how biological agents overcome these challenges. The focus is on how feeling guides i) balancing exploration and exploitation; ii) flexible formation and (goal-directed) manipulation of abstractions, and; ii) underwrites our capacity for metareasoning and attentional allocation through mental action (selection of which computations to perform). The second step is a new strand of research, which uses this lens on general intelligence to consider particular issues in AI alignment.

How much funding are they requesting?

$50,000

Here you can review the entire public portion of the application (which contains a lot more information about the applicant and their project):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qJ70dKpK-tzdySzMxgC42wjEeBRqEvu6vVBl1aOGZEk/edit#