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 regret talking mainly about what is "unproven" when I really meant to talk about what (a) has tight feedback loops and (b) is approached experimentally. See the clarification in http://lesswrong.com/lw/ic0/where_ive_changed_my_mind_on_my_approach_to/
I think MIRI can fit this description in some ways (I'm particularly excited about the AI Impacts blog), but it doesn't in other ways.
What do you think of the stability under self-modification example in this essay?
I haven't taken the time to fully understand MIRI's work. But my reading is that MIRI's work is incremental without being empirical--like most people working in math & theoretical computer science, they are using proofs to advance their knowledge rather than randomized controlled trials. So this might meet the "tight feedback loops" criterion without meeting the "approached experimentally" criterion.
BTW, you might be interested in this comment of mine... (read more)