Blog

Category: Analysis

Assessing our past and potential impact

We’ve received several thoughtful questions in response to our fundraising post to the Effective Altruism Forum and our new FAQ. From quant trader Maxwell Fritz: My snap reaction to MIRI’s pitches has typically been, “yeah, AI is a real concern....

When AI Accelerates AI

Last week, Nate Soares outlined his case for prioritizing long-term AI safety work: 1. Humans have a fairly general ability to make scientific and technological progress. The evolved cognitive faculties that make us good at organic chemistry overlap heavily with...

MIRI’s Approach

MIRI’s mission is “to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.” How can we ensure any such thing? It’s a daunting task, especially given that we don’t have any smarter-than-human machines to work with at...

Four Background Claims

MIRI’s mission is to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact. Why is this mission important, and why do we think that there’s work we can do today to help ensure any such thing? In...

Davis on AI capability and motivation

In a review of Superintelligence, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis voices disagreement with a number of claims he attributes to Nick Bostrom: that “intelligence is a potentially infinite quantity with a well-defined, one-dimensional value,” that a superintelligent AI could “easily...

Brooks and Searle on AI volition and timelines

Nick Bostrom’s concerns about the future of AI have sparked a busy public discussion. His arguments were echoed by leading AI researcher Stuart Russell in “Transcending complacency on superintelligent machines” (co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek), and...