August 2016 Newsletter

Research updates

A new paper: “Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems.” Half of our research team will be focusing on this research agenda going forward, while the other half continues to focus on the agent foundations agenda.
New at AI Impacts: Returns to Scale in Research
Evan Lloyd represented MIRIxLosAngeles at AGI-16 this month, presenting “Asymptotic Logical Uncertainty and the Benford Test” (slides).
We’ll be announcing a breakthrough in logical uncertainty this month, related to Scott Garrabrant’s previous results.

General updates

Our 2015 in review, with a focus on the technical problems we made progress on.
Another recap: how our summer colloquium series and fellows program went.
We’ve uploaded our first CSRBAI talks: Stuart Russell on “AI: The Story So Far” (video), Alan Fern on “Toward Recognizing and Explaining Uncertainty” (video), and Francesca Rossi on “Moral Preferences” (video).
We submitted our recommendations to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, cross-posted to our blog.
We attended IJCAI and the White House’s AI and economics event. Furman on technological unemployment (video) and other talks are available online.
Talks from June’s safety and control in AI event are also online. Speakers included Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz (video), FLI’s Richard Mallah (video), Google Brain’s Dario Amodei (video), and IARPA’s Jason Matheny (video).

News and links

Complexity No Bar to AI: Gwern Branwen argues that computational complexity theory provides little reason to doubt that AI can surpass human intelligence.
Bill Nordhaus, the world’s leading climate change economist, writes a paper on the economics of singularity scenarios.
The Open Philanthropy Project has awarded Robin Hanson a three-year $265,000 grant to study multipolar AI scenarios. See also Hanson’s new argument for expecting a long era of whole-brain emulations prior to the development of AI with superhuman reasoning abilities.
“Superintelligence Cannot Be Contained” discusses computability-theoretic limits to AI verification.
The Financial Times runs a good profile of Nick Bostrom.
DeepMind software reduces Google’s data center cooling bill by 40%.
In a promising development, US federal regulators argue for the swift development and deployment of self-driving cars to reduce automobile accidents: “We cannot wait for perfect. We lose too many lives waiting for perfect.”