Future of Humanity Institute
FHI is a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford. Academics at FHI bring the tools of mathematics, philosophy and social sciences to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects. The Institute is led by Founding Director Professor Nick Bostrom.
Over the long run, technology has improved the human condition. Nevertheless, the economic progress from technological innovation has not arrived equitably or smoothly. While innovation often produces great wealth, it has also often been disruptive to labor, society, and world order. In light of ongoing advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”), we should prepare for the […]
Reframing Superintelligence Abstract: Studies of superintelligent-level systems have typically posited AI functionality that plays the role of a mind in a rational utility-directed agent, and hence employ an abstraction initially developed as an idealized model of human decision makers. Today, developments in AI technology highlight intelligent systems that are quite unlike minds, and provide a […]
A recent paper by FHI researcher Stuart Armstrong and former intern Soren Mindermann (now at the Vector Institute) has been accepted at NeurIPS 2018. The paper, Impossibility of deducing preferences and rationality from human policy, considers the scenario in which AI system learns the values and biases of a human agent concurrently. This extends an existing […]
A ‘long read’ piece in The Guardian newspaper today examines Covid-19 in the context of earlier pandemics, and reflects on how to manage the existential risk posed by bio-technology today. It is an edited extract from Toby Ord’s new book The Precipice. Read the piece on The Guardian. Toby is also cited in a piece […]
Applications for the 2020 Summer Research Fellowship have now closed. Impact of Covid-19 on the fellowship: we are currently considering contingency plans for the summer research fellowship, in case Covid-19 makes it unsafe for the fellowship to run in person. Options include delaying the fellowship, and running it remotely. We will communicate in more detail […]
Overview The Future of Humanity Institute is now opening applications for our AI Alignment Visiting Fellowship. This fellowship allows individuals to visit us for a period of three or more months to pursue research related to the theory or design of human-aligned AI. It is supervised largely by Michael Cohen, Stuart Armstrong and Ryan Carey […]
