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.
What is your AI arrival timeline? Once we get AI, how quickly do you think it will self-improve? How likely do you think it is that there will be a singleton vs. many competing AIs?
(1) Eventually. Predicting the future is hard. My 90% confidence interval conditioned on no global catastrophes is maybe 5 to 80 years. That is to say, I don't know.
(2) I fairly strongly expect a fast takeoff. (Interesting aside: I was recently at a dinner full of AI scientists, some of them very skeptical about the whole long-term safety problem, who unanimously professed that they expect a fast takeoff -- I'm not sure yet how to square this with the fact that Bostrom's survey showed fast takeoff was a minority position).
It seems hard (but not impossible)... (read more)