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 do you think of popular portrayals of AI-risk in general? Do you think there's much of a point either in trying to spread broad awareness of the issue? Do you think that any such efforts ultimately do more harm than good, and that we should try to keep AI-risk more secretive?
For example, are things like like Ex Machina, which doesn't really present the full AI arguement, but does make it obvious that AI is a risk, or Wait But Why's AI posts good?
Thanks!