† $125,000 in backing for this challenge is being generously provided by Rob Zahra, Quixey, Clippy, Luke Nosek, Edwin Evans, Rick Schwall, Brian Cartmell, Mike Blume, Jeff Bone, Johan Edsträm, Zvi Mowshowitz, John Salvatier, Louie Helm, Kevin Fischer, Emil Gilliam, Rob and Oksana Brazell, Guy Srinivasan, John Chisholm, and John Ku.
The year 2011 has been huge for Artificial Intelligence. With the IBM computer Watson defeating two top Jeopardy! champions in February, it’s clear that the field is making steady progress. Journalists like Torie Bosch of Slate have argued that “We need to move from robot-apocalypse jokes to serious discussions about the emerging technology.” We couldn’t agree more — in fact, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute has been thinking about how to create safe and ethical artificial intelligence since long before the Singularity landed on the front cover of TIME magazine.
The last 1.5 years were our biggest ever. Since the beginning of 2010, we have:
- Held our annual Singularity Summit, in San Francisco. Speakers included Ray Kurzweil, James Randi, Irene Pepperberg, and many others.
- Held the first Singularity Summit Australia and Singularity Summit Salt Lake City.
- Held a wildly successful Rationality Minicamp.
- Published seven research papers, including Yudkowsky’s much-awaited ‘Timeless Decision Theory‘.
- Helped philosopher David Chalmers write his seminal paper ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis’, which has sparked broad discussion in academia, including an entire issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies and a book from Springer devoted to responses to Chalmers’ paper.
- Launched the Research Associates program.
- Brought MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark onto our advisory board, published our Singularity FAQ, and much more.
In the coming year, we plan to do the following:
- Hold our annual Singularity Summit, in New York City this year.
- Publish three chapters in the upcoming academic volume The Singularity Hypothesis, along with several other papers.
- Improve organizational transparency by creating a simpler, easier-to-use website that includes Machine Intelligence Research Institute planning and policy documents.
- Publish a document of open research problems related to Friendly AI, to clarify the research space and encourage other researchers to contribute to our mission.
- Add additional skilled researchers to our Research Associates program.
- Publish well-researched documents making the case for existential risk reduction as optimal philanthropy.
- Diversify our funding sources by applying for targeted grants and advertising our affinity credit card program.
We appreciate your support for our high-impact work. As PayPal co-founder and Machine Intelligence Research Institute donor Peter Thiel said:
“I’m interested in facilitating a forum in which there can be… substantive research on how to bring about a world in which AI will be friendly to humans rather than hostile… [The Machine Intelligence Research Institute represents] a combination of very talented people with the right problem space [they’re] going after… [They’ve] done a phenomenal job… on a shoestring budget. From my perspective, the key question is always: What’s the amount of leverage you get as an investor? Where can a small amount make a big difference? This is a very leveraged kind of philanthropy.”
Donate now, and seize a better than usual chance to move our work forward. Credit card transactions are securely processed through Causes.com, Google Checkout, or PayPal. If you have questions about donating, please call Amy Willey at (586) 381-1801.
