The Singularity Institute Blog

Help us raise $100,000 that will go towards funding a website redesign, new research papers, and staging a bigger and better Singularity Summit 2012 in San Francisco. This fundraiser ends February 20th, so please contribute now to help us achieve our goal!

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.

Follow the progress of our fundraiser at http://singinst.org/2011winterfundraiser.

The Singularity Summit was a huge success. We raised over $300,000, one-third of that a donation from Jaan Tallinn, another third from a variety of generous donors who gave during or immediately after the Summit, and a third from ticket sales. We have roughly $500,000 in the bank, while annual payroll expenses are about $350,000. We almost have enough money to make it through the next year without adding any research staff, though we definitely would like to add additional researchers. In the meantime, our (unpaid) Research Associates team has been growing, and is tackling a variety of projects.

Since the Singularity Summit in October, our President Michael Vassar moved on to help found Personalized Medicine, a company we are all excited about, and Luke Muehlhauser was appointed Executive Director. Luke answered questions about these changes and our future plans in a recent video Q&A. I encourage you to watch it, and submit additional questions you may have about the Singularity Institute.

We have seven staff at this time: Luke, Michael Anissimov, Anna Salamon, Carl Shulman, Amy Willey, Louie Helm, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Our internal collaboration has increased, we’re keeping work logs, and we regularly eat dinner together. It’s becoming more of a family.

What are we all doing? Luke and Michael are working on a new website for the Singularity Institute. Amy and Luke are working hard to expand the Singularity Summit brand and bring the Summit to “the next level.” Anna and Eliezer are building a curriculum for the new Rationality Org, which we hope to spin off as a separate organization from Singularity Institute sometime next year. Luke, Anna, and Carl have been working on a variety of research papers, and Carl has also been working with the fast-growing “optimal philanthropy” movement, which is now poised to direct substantial funds over the next few years to reducing existential risks. Louie is working on donor relations, fundraising, recruiting, operations, and has also contributed to some of our forthcoming research articles.

In the coming year, we look forward to improving communication and transparency with our supporters, and to increasing the rate of our published research output.

A full transcript of this video is hosted at Less Wrong.