Singularity Institute $100,000 end-of-year fundraiser only 20% filled so far

Louie

8 Singularity Institute $100,000 end-of-year fundraiser only 20% filled so far

by Louie

27th Dec 2011

2 min read

8

** cross-posted from http://singinst.org/2011winterfundraiser/ **

Contains detailed info about accomplishments and plans at SI. Thanks for supporting our work! -Louie

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER

Recent books like Machine Ethics from Cambridge University Press and Robot Ethics from MIT Press, along with the U.S. military-funded research that resulted in Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots show that the world is waking up to the challenges of building safe and ethical AI. But these projects focus on limited AI applications and fail to address the most important concern: how to ensure that smarter-than-human AI benefits humanity. The Singularity Institute has been working on that problem longer than anybody, a full decade before the Singularity landed on the cover of TIME magazine.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN 2011

2011 was our biggest year yet. Since the year began, we have:

Held our annual Singularity Summit in New York City, with more than 900 in attendance. Speakers included inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, economist Tyler Cowen, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Skeptic publisher Michael Shermer, Mathematica and WolframAlpha creator Stephen Wolfram, neuroscientist Christof Koch, MIT physicist Max Tegmark, and famed Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings.
Held a smaller Singularity Summit in Salt Lake City.
Held a one-week Rationality Minicamp and a ten-week Rationality Boot Camp.
Created the Research Associates program, which currently has 7 researchers coordinating with Singularity Institute.
Published our Singularity FAQ, IntelligenceExplosion.com, and Friendly-AI.com.
Wrote three chapters for Springer's upcoming volume The Singularity Hypothesis, along with four other research papers.
Began work on a new, clearer website design with lots of new content, which should go live Q1 2012.
Began outlining open problems in Singularity research to help outside collaborators better understand our research priorities.

FUTURE PLANS YOU CAN HELP SUPPORT

In the coming year, we plan to do the following:

Hold our annual Singularity Summit, in San Francisco this year.
Improve organizational transparency by creating a simpler, easier-to-use website that includes Singularity Institute planning and policy documents.
Publish a document of open research problems in Singularity Research, to clarify the research space and encourage other researchers to contribute to our mission.
Add additional skilled researchers to our Research Associates program.
Publish a well-researched document making the case for existential risk reduction as optimal philanthropy.
Diversify our funding sources by applying for targeted grants and advertising our affinity credit card program.

We appreciate your support for our high-impact work. As Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn said:

We became the dominant species on this planet by being the most intelligent species around. This century we are going to cede that crown to machines… Since we have only one shot at getting this transition right, the importance of Singularity Institute's work cannot be overestimated.

Now is your last chance to make a tax-deductible donation in 2011.

If you'd like to support our work: please donate now!

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8 Singularity Institute $100,000 end-of-year fundraiser only 20% filled so far

by Louie

27th Dec 2011

2 min read

8

** cross-posted from http://singinst.org/2011winterfundraiser/ **

Contains detailed info about accomplishments and plans at SI. Thanks for supporting our work! -Louie

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER

ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN 2011

2011 was our biggest year yet. Since the year began, we have:

Held our annual Singularity Summit in New York City, with more than 900 in attendance. Speakers included inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, economist Tyler Cowen, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Skeptic publisher Michael Shermer, Mathematica and WolframAlpha creator Stephen Wolfram, neuroscientist Christof Koch, MIT physicist Max Tegmark, and famed Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings.
Held a smaller Singularity Summit in Salt Lake City.
Held a one-week Rationality Minicamp and a ten-week Rationality Boot Camp.
Created the Research Associates program, which currently has 7 researchers coordinating with Singularity Institute.
Published our Singularity FAQ, IntelligenceExplosion.com, and Friendly-AI.com.
Wrote three chapters for Springer's upcoming volume The Singularity Hypothesis, along with four other research papers.
Began work on a new, clearer website design with lots of new content, which should go live Q1 2012.
Began outlining open problems in Singularity research to help outside collaborators better understand our research priorities.

FUTURE PLANS YOU CAN HELP SUPPORT

In the coming year, we plan to do the following:

Hold our annual Singularity Summit, in San Francisco this year.
Improve organizational transparency by creating a simpler, easier-to-use website that includes Singularity Institute planning and policy documents.
Publish a document of open research problems in Singularity Research, to clarify the research space and encourage other researchers to contribute to our mission.
Add additional skilled researchers to our Research Associates program.
Publish a well-researched document making the case for existential risk reduction as optimal philanthropy.
Diversify our funding sources by applying for targeted grants and advertising our affinity credit card program.

We appreciate your support for our high-impact work. As Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn said:

We became the dominant species on this planet by being the most intelligent species around. This century we are going to cede that crown to machines… Since we have only one shot at getting this transition right, the importance of Singularity Institute's work cannot be overestimated.

Now is your last chance to make a tax-deductible donation in 2011.

If you'd like to support our work: please donate now!

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HoldenKarnofsky14y310

Hi, here are the details of whom I spoke with and why:

I originally emailed Michael Vassar, letting him know I was going to be in the Bay Area and asking whether there was anyone appropriate for me to meet with. He set me up with Jasen Murray.
Justin Shovelain and an SIAI donor were also present when I spoke with Jasen. There may have been one or two others; I don't recall.
After we met, I sent the notes to Jasen for review. He sent back comments and also asked me to run it by Amy Willey and Michael Vassar, who each provided some corrections via email that I incorporated.

A couple of other comments:

If SIAI wants to set up another room for more funding discussion, I'd be happy to do that and to post new notes.
In general, we're always happy to post corrections or updates on any content we post, including how that content is framed and presented. The best way to get our attention is to email us at info@givewell.org

And a tangential comment/question for Louie: I do not understand why you link to my two LW posts using the anchor text you use. These posts are not about GiveWell's process. They both argue that standard Bayesian inference indicates against the literal use of non-robust expected value estimates, particularly in "Pascal's Mugging" type scenarios. Michael Vassar's response to the first of these was that I was attacking a straw man. There are unresolved disagreements about some of the specific modeling assumptions and implications of these posts, but I don't see any way in which they imply a "limited process" or "blinding to the possibility of SIAI's being a good giving opportunity." I do agree that SIAI hasn't been a fit for our standard process (and is more suited to GiveWell Labs) but I don't see anything in these posts that illustrates that - what do you have in mind here?

CarlShulman14y110

Hi Holden,

I just read this thread today. I made a clarification upthread about the description of my comment above, under Louie's. Also, I'd like to register that I thought your characterization of that interview as such was fine, even without the clarifications you make here.

They both argue that standard Bayesian inference indicates against the literal use of non-robust expected value estimates, particularly in "Pascal's Mugging" type scenarios.

As a technical point, I don't think these posts address "Pascal's Mugging" scenarios in ... (read more)

4Louie14y

Thanks for the helpful comments! I was uninformed about all those details above. [...] One of the posts has the sub-heading "The GiveWell approach" and all of the analysis in both posts use examples of charities you're comparing. I agree you weren't just talking about the GiveWell process... you were talking about a larger philosophy of science you have that informs things like the GiveWell process. I recognize that you're making sophisticated arguments for your points. Especially the assumptions that you claim simply must be true to satisfy your intuition that charities should be rewarded for transparency and punished otherwise. Those seem wise from a "getting things done" point of view for an org like GiveWell -- even when there is no mathematical reason those assumptions should be true -- but only a human-level tit-for-tat shame/enforcement mechanism you hope eventually makes this circularly "true" through repeated application. Seems fair enough. But adding regression adjustments to cancel out the effectiveness of any charity which looks too effective to be believed (based on the common sense of the evaluator) seems like a pretty big finger on the scale. Why do so much analysis in the beginning if the last step of the algorithm is just "re-adjust effectiveness and expected value to equal what feels right"? Your adjustment factor amounts to a kind of Egalitarian Effectiveness Assumption: We are all created equal at turning money into goodness. Or perhaps it's more of a negative statement, like, "None of us is any better than the best of us at turning money into goodness" -- where the upper limit on the best is something like 1000x or whatever the evaluator has encountered in the past. Any claims made above the best limit gets adjusted back down -- those guys were trying to Pascal's Mug us! That's the way in which there's a blinding effect. You disbelieve the claims of any groups who claims to be more effective per capita than you think is possible.

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