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MIRI December 2016 Newsletter

Published
23 December, 2016
Author
Rob Bensinger

Contents

We’re in the final weeks of our push to cover our funding shortfall, and we’re now halfway to our $160,000 goal. For potential donors who are interested in an outside perspective, Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) researcher Owen Cotton-Barratt has written up why he’s donating to MIRI this year. (Donation page.)Research updates

General updates

  • We teamed up with a number of AI safety researchers to help compile a list of recommended AI safety readings for the Center for Human-Compatible AI. See this page if you would like to get involved with CHCAI’s research.
  • Investment analyst Ben Hoskin reviews MIRI and other organizations involved in AI safety.

News and links

  • The Off-Switch Game“: Dylan Hadfield-Manell, Anca Dragan, Pieter Abbeel, and Stuart Russell show that an AI agent’s corrigibility is closely tied to the uncertainty it has about its utility function.
  • Russell and Allan Dafoe critique an inaccurate summary by Oren Etzioni of a new survey of AI experts on superintelligence.
  • Sam Harris interviews Russell on the basics of AI risk (video). See also Russell’s new Q&A on the future of AI.
  • Future of Life Institute co-founder Viktoriya Krakovna and FHI researcher Jan Leike join Google DeepMind’s safety team.
  • GoodAI sponsors a challenge to “accelerate the search for general artificial intelligence”.
  • OpenAI releases Universe, “a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games”. Meanwhile, DeepMind has open-sourced their own platform for general AI research, DeepMind Lab.
  • Staff at GiveWell and the Centre for Effective Altruism, along with others in the effective altruism community, explain where they’re donating this year.
  • FHI is seeking AI safety interns, researchers, and admins: jobs page.

This newsletter was originally posted here.

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