Thanks to our dedicated supporters, we met our goal for our 2012 Winter Fundraiser. Thank you!

The fundraiser ran for 45 days, from December 6, 2012 to January 20, 2013.

We met our $115,000 goal, raising a total of $230,000 for our operations in 2013.

Every donation that the Machine Intelligence Research Institute receives is powerful support for our mission — ensuring that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence benefits human society.

In this 2010 conversation hosted by bloggingheads.tv, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci attempt to unpack the fundamental assumptions involved in determining the plausability of a technological singularity.

A transcript of the conversation is now available here, thanks to Ethan Dickinson and Patrick Stevens of MIRIvolunteers.org. A video of the conversation can be found at the bloggingheads website.

Greetings from the Executive Director

Dear friends of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute,

It’s been just over one year since I took the reins at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Looking back, I must say I’m proud of what we accomplished in the last year.

Consider the “top priorities for 2011-2012″ from our August 2011 strategic plan. The first priority was “public-facing research on creating a positive singularity.” On this front, we did so well that MIRI had more peer-reviewed publications in 2012 than in all past years combined (well, except for the fact that some publications scheduled for 2012 have been delayed until 2013, but you can still download preprints of those publications from our research page).

Our second priority was “outreach / education / fundraising.” Outreach and education was mostly achieved through the Singularity Summit and through the new Center for Applied Rationality, which was spun out of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute but is now its own 501c3 organization running entirely from its own funding. As for fundraising: 2012 was our most successful year yet.

Our third priority was “improved organizational effectiveness.” Here, we grew by leaps and bounds throughout 2012. Throughout the year, we built our first comprehensive donor database (to improve donor relations), launched a regular newsletter (to improve public communication), instituted best practices in management and accounting throughout the organization, began tracking costs and predicted benefits for all major projects, started renting a new office in Berkeley that now bustles with activity every day, updated the design and content on our website, gained $40,000/mo of free Google Adwords directing traffic to MIRI web properties, and more.

Our fourth priority was to run our annual Singularity Summit. We were pleased not only to run our most professional Summit yet, but also to subsequently sell the Summit to Singularity University (SU). We are confident that the Summit is in good hands, and we are also pleased that SU’s acquisition of the Singularity Summit provides us with some much-needed funding expand our research program.

That said, most of the money from the Summit acquisition is being dedicated to a special fund for Friendly AI researchers, and does not support our daily operations. For that, we need your help! Please contribute to our ongoing matching challenge, which ends January 20th!

Onward and upward,

Luke

(more…)

Greetings from the Executive Director

Dear friends of the Singularity Institute,

This month marks the biggest shift in our operations since the Singularity Summit was founded in 2006. Now that Singularity University has acquired the Singularity Summit (details below), and SI’s interests in rationality training are being developed by the now-separate Center for Applied Rationality, the Singularity Institute is making a major transition. For 12 years we’ve largely focused on movement-building — through the Singularity Summit, Less Wrong, and other programs. This work was needed to build up a community of support for our mission and a pool of potential researchers for our unique interdisciplinary work.

Now, the time has come to say “Mission Accomplished Well Enough to Pivot to Research.” Our community of supporters is now large enough that qualified researchers are available for us to hire, if we can afford to hire them. Having published 30+ research papers and dozens more original research articles on Less Wrong, we certainly haven’t neglected research. But in 2013 we plan to pivot so that a much larger share of the funds we raise is spent on research. If you’d like to help with that, please contribute to our ongoing fundraising drive.

Onward and upward,

Luke

(more…)

Thanks to the generosity of several major donors,^† every donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute made now until January 5th, 2013 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $115,000!

Donate Now!

Milestones:

• $0
• $28.75K
• $57.5K
• $86.25K
• $115K

Progress:

$115000

Now is your chance to double your impact while helping us raise up to $230,000 to help fund our research program.

(If you’re unfamiliar with our mission, please see our press kit and read our short research summary: Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence.)

Now that Singularity University has acquired the Singularity Summit, and SI’s interests in rationality training are being developed by the now-separate CFAR, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is making a profound transition. (Note that most of the money from the acquisition is being placed in a separate fund for Friendly AI researchers, and therefore does not support our daily operations or other programs.)

For 12 years we’ve largely focused on movement-building — through the Singularity Summit, Less Wrong, and other programs. This work was needed to build up a community of support for our mission and a pool of potential researchers for our unique interdisciplinary work.

Now, the time has come to say “Mission Accomplished.” Or at least, “Mission Accomplished Well Enough to Pivot to Research.” Our community of supporters is now large enough that many qualified researchers are available for us to hire, if we can afford to hire them.

Having published 30+ research papers and dozens more original research articles on Less Wrong, we certainly haven’t neglected research. But in 2013 we plan to pivot so that a much larger share of the funds we raise is spent on research.

Accomplishments in 2012

• Held a one-week research workshop on one of the open problems in Friendly AI research, and got progress that participants estimate would be the equivalent of 1-3 papers if published. (Details forthcoming. The workshop participants were Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Christiano, Marcello Herreshoff, and Mihaly Barasz.)
• Produced our annual Singularity Summit in San Francisco. Speakers included Ray Kurzweil, Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Temple Grandin, Peter Norvig, and many others.
• Launched the new Center for Applied Rationality, which ran 5 workshops in 2012, including Rationality for Entrepreneurs and SPARC (for young math geniuses), and also published one (early-version) smartphone app, The Credence Game.
• Launched the redesigned, updated, and reorganized Singularity.org website.
• Achieved most of the goals from our August 2011 strategic plan.
• 11 new research publications.
• Eliezer published the first 12 posts in his sequence Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners, the precursor to his forthcoming sequence, Open Problems in Friendly AI.
• SI staff members published many other substantive articles on Less Wrong, including How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction, How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup, a Solomonoff Induction tutorial, The Human’s Hidden Utility Function (Maybe), How can I reduce existential risk from AI?, AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analysis, and Checklist of Rationality Habits.
• Launched our new volunteers platform, SingularityVolunteers.org.
• Hired two new researchers, Kaj Sotala and Alex Altair.
• Published our press kit to make journalists’ lives easier.
• And of course much more.

Future Plans You Can Help Support

In the coming months, we plan to do the following:

• As part of Singularity University’s acquisition of the Singularity Summit, we will be changing our name and launching a new website.
• Eliezer will publish his sequence Open Problems in Friendly AI.
• We will publish nicely-edited ebooks (Kindle, iBooks, and PDF) for many of our core materials, to make them more accessible: The Sequences, 2006-2009, Facing the Singularity, and The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI Foom Debate.
• We will publish several more research papers, including “Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey” and a short, technical introduction to timeless decision theory.
• We will set up the infrastructure required to host a productive Friendly AI team and try hard to recruit enough top-level math talent to launch it.

(Other projects are still being surveyed for likely cost and strategic impact.)

We appreciate your support for our high-impact work! Donate now, and seize a better than usual chance to move our work forward. Credit card transactions are securely processed using either PayPal or Google Checkout. If you have questions about donating, please contact Louie Helm at (510) 717-1477 or louie@intelligence.org.

^† $115,000 of total matching funds has been provided by Edwin Evans, Mihaly Barasz, Rob Zahra, Alexei Andreev, Jeff Bone, Michael Blume, Guy Srinivasan, and Kevin Fischer.