MIRI’s January 2014 Newsletter

Dear friends,Wow! MIRI’s donors finished our Winter 2013 fundraising drive three weeks early. Our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed.

Research Updates

MIRI’s December workshop resulted in 7 new technical reports and one new paper. Photos from the workshop are here.
New paper by Luke Muehlhauser and Nick Bostrom: “Why We Need Friendly AI.” io9’s George Dvorsky interviewed Luke about the paper here.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robby Bensinger have begun to describe another open problem in Friendly AI: naturalized induction.
Two new interviews: Josef Urban on machine learning and automated reasoning, and DARPA’s Kathleen Fisher on high-assurance systems.

Other Updates

We published the first part of our 2013 in Review series, on operations.
We published a transcript and “summary of disagreements” for a conversation about MIRI strategy held with Jacob Steinhardt (Stanford), Holden Karnofsky (GiveWell), and Dario Amodei (Stanford).
We published our first donor story: “Noticing Inferential Distance.”

Other Links

FQXI is holding an essay contest on the subject of “How Should Humanity Steer the Future?” Submission deadline is April 18th. First prize is $10,000, and up to 20 entries may win $1,000 or more.
MIT’s Max Tegmark on AI x-risk at the HuffPost blog.
“A Long-run Perspective on Strategic Cause Selection and Philanthropy,” by Nick Beckstead and Carl Shulman.
In case you missed it last year, Bostrom’s “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority” remains the best extant summary of existential risks in general.

As always, please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Best,

Luke Muehlhauser
Executive Director