The Open Philanthropy Project recently announced a grant of £1,620,452 to the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) to provide general support as well as a grant of £88,922 to allow us to hire Piers Millet to lead our work on biosecurity . Most of the larger grant adds unrestricted funding to FHI’s reserves, which will let us hire the most talented people more flexibly because we will be less dependent on the large block academic grants that provide much of our funding.
FHI’s research themes
The grant will help us continue our work on four main research themes:
- Macrostrategy – understanding which crucial considerations shape what is at stake for the future of humanity.
- AI safety – researching computer science techniques for building safer artificially intelligent systems.
- AI strategy – understanding how geopolitics, governance structures, and strategic trends will affect the development of advanced artificial intelligence.
- Biosecurity – working with institutions around the world to reduce risk from especially dangerous pathogens.
The smaller grant supports, in particular, the work of Senior Research Fellow Dr. Piers Millett, who has more than a decade of experience working with the Biological Weapons Convention as well as experience with a wide range of institutions like the World Health Organisation. He leads FHI’s biosecurity work.
You can read more about our work and plans for the future in the 2016 Annual Review.
Supporting FHI’s work
This grant from the Open Philanthropy Project represents a big step forward for FHI. We hope that it will help us bring many of the world’s top researchers to join our staff who have between them over 10,000 academic citations and over 10,000 mentions in news media.
If you are interested in working with us, we will advertise jobs soon. You can join our mailing list at the vacancies page to get notified when they are advertised. We are accepting applications already for internships with our machine learning team working on AI Safety under Owain Evans.
We especially encourage applications from members of demographic groups that are currently underrepresented at FHI.