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.
I usually see MIRI's goal in its technical agenda is "to ensure that the development of smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive impact on humanity." Is there any chance of expanding this to include all sentient beings? If not, why not? Given that nonhuman animals vastly outnumber the human ones, I would think the most pressing question for AI is its effect on nonhuman animals rather than on human ones.
Yep :-)
The official mission statement is just "has a positive impact." I'll encourage people to also use phrasing that's more inclusive to other sentients in future papers/communications.