August 2015 Newsletter

• We’ve rewritten the first and last sections of the main paper summarizing our research program. This version of the paper will also be published with minor changes in the Springer anthology The Technological Singularity.
• New analyses: Four Background Claims; MIRI’s Approach
• New at AI Impacts: Conversation with Steve Potter; Costs of Human-Level Hardware
• New at IAFF: Waterfall Truth Predicates; A Counterexample to an Informal Conjecture…; An Idea for Corrigible, Recursively Improving Math Oracles
• Jessica Taylor has joined MIRI’s full-time research team! A fifth MIRI researcher will be coming on in September.

 
General updates

• Our 2015 Summer Fundraiser is live! Our announcement of this on the Effective Altruism Forum makes the case for donating now more explicit.
• 139 people have collectively donated $283,167 over the last two weeks! This means that we’ve just hit our first of five funding goals! Donations over the next four weeks will now go to our second goal: Accelerating MIRI.
• MIRI has a new Frequently Asked Questions page! If you have questions you’d like answered here or on the blog, shoot me an email.
• An Astounding Year summarizes recent events in AI risk mitigation.
• Cornell computer scientist Bart Selman has become a MIRI research advisor.

 
News and links

• We’re at day three of the Effective Altruism Global conference! You can watch a selection of talks on the livestream.
• Thousands sign an open letter by the Future of Life Institute advocating “a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”