Hello Effective Altruism Forum, I am Nate Soares, and I will be here to answer your questions tomorrow, Thursday the 11th of June, 15:00-18:00 US Pacific time. You can post questions here in the interim.
Last week Monday, I took the reins as executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. MIRI focuses on studying technical problems of long-term AI safety. I'm happy to chat about what that means, why it's important, why we think we can make a difference now, what the open technical problems are, how we approach them, and some of my plans for the future.
I'm also happy to answer questions about my personal history and how I got here, or about personal growth and mindhacking (a subject I touch upon frequently in my blog, Minding Our Way), or about whatever else piques your curiosity. This is an AMA, after all!
EDIT (15:00): All right, I'm here. Dang there are a lot of questions! Let's get this started :-)
EDIT (18:00): Ok, that's a wrap. Thanks, everyone! Those were great questions.
Congrats on the new position!
My question: what advances does MIRI hope to achieve in the next 5 years?
Short version: FAI. (You said "hope", not "expect" :-p)
Longer version: Hard question, both because (a) I don't know how you want me to trade off between how nice the advance would be and how likely we are to get it, and (b) my expectations for the next five years are very volatile. In the year since Nick Bostrom released Superintelligence, there has been a huge wave of interest in the future of AI (due in no small part to the efforts of FLI and their wonderful Puerto Rico conference!), and my expectations of where I'll be in five years ... (read more)