Blog

Author: Rob Bensinger

June 2017 Newsletter

Research updates A new AI Impacts paper: “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?” News coverage at Digital Trends and MIT Technology Review. New at IAFF: Cooperative Oracles; Jessica Taylor on the AAMLS Agenda; An Approach to Logically Updateless Decisions Our...

May 2017 Newsletter

Research updates New at IAFF: The Ubiquitous Converse Lawvere Problem; Two Major Obstacles for Logical Inductor Decision Theory; Generalizing Foundations of Decision Theory II. New at AI Impacts: Guide to Pages on AI Timeline Predictions “Decisions Are For Making Bad...

2017 Updates and Strategy

In our last strategy update (August 2016), Nate wrote that MIRI’s priorities were to make progress on our agent foundations agenda and begin work on our new “Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems” agenda, to collaborate and communicate with other...

Decisions are for making bad outcomes inconsistent

Nate Soares’ recent decision theory paper with Ben Levinstein, “Cheating Death in Damascus,” prompted some valuable questions and comments from an acquaintance (anonymized here). I’ve put together edited excerpts from the commenter’s email below, with Nate’s responses. The discussion concerns...

April 2017 Newsletter

Our newest publication, “Cheating Death in Damascus,” makes the case for functional decision theory, our general framework for thinking about rational choice and counterfactual reasoning. In other news, our research team is expanding! Sam Eisenstat and Marcello Herreshoff, both previously...

Two new researchers join MIRI

MIRI’s research team is growing! I’m happy to announce that we’ve hired two new research fellows to contribute to our work on AI alignment: Sam Eisenstat and Marcello Herreshoff, both from Google.   Sam Eisenstat studied pure mathematics at the...