MIRI Updates
Ensuring smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive outcome
I recently gave a talk at Google on the problem of aligning smarter-than-human AI with operators’ goals: The talk was inspired by “AI Alignment: Why It’s Hard, and Where to Start,” and serves as an introduction to the...
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...
2016 in review
It’s time again for my annual review of MIRI’s activities. ((See our previous reviews: 2015, 2014, 2013.)) In this post I’ll provide a summary of what we did in 2016, see how our activities compare to our previously stated goals...
New paper: “Cheating Death in Damascus”
MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares and Rutgers/UIUC decision theorist Ben Levinstein have a new paper out introducing functional decision theory (FDT), MIRI’s proposal for a general-purpose decision theory. The paper, titled “Cheating Death in Damascus,” considers a wide range of...
