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.
Right now we’re talent-constrained, but we’re also fairly well-positioned to solve that problem over the next six months. Jessica Taylor is joining us in august. We have another researcher or two pretty far along in the pipeline, and we’re running four or five more research workshops this summer, and CFAR is running a summer fellows program in July. It’s quite plausible that we’ll hire a handful of new researchers before the end of 2015, in which case our runway would start looking pretty short, and it’s pretty likely that we’ll be funding constrained again by the end of the year.