The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization that works to reduce global catastrophic and

existential risks A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying Modernity, modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction o ...

facing humanity, particularly

existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the hypothesis that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in human extinction or some other unrecoverable global catastrophe. It is argued that the hum ...

(AI). The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions. Its founders include MIT

cosmologist Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...

Max Tegmark Max Erik Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute. He is also a scienti ...

and

Skype Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, deb ...

co-founder

Jaan Tallinn Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian billionaire computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/ Kazaa. Jaan Tallinn is a leading figure in the field ...

, and its advisors include entrepreneur

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The Bori ...

Mission

FLI's mission is reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. FLI is particularly focused on the potential risks to humanity from the development of human-level or

superintelligent A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of problem-solving systems (e.g., superintelligent language ...

artificial general intelligence Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fictio ...

(AGI), but also works on risks from biotechnology, nuclear weapons and climate change. The Institute's work is made up grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions.

Key people

The Institute was founded in March 2014 by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

cosmologist

co-founder

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was List of mergers and acquisitions by Google, acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsid ...

research scientist Viktoriya Krakovna,

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

postdoctoral scholar Meia Chita-Tegmark, and UCSC physicist

Anthony Aguirre Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist. Aguirre is a professor and holds the Faggin Presidential Chair for the Physics of Information at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the co-founder and associate scientific director of the ...

. The Institute's advisors include computer scientists

Stuart J. Russell Stuart Jonathan Russell (born 1962) is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct ...

and

Francesca Rossi Francesca Rossi (born December 7, 1962) is an Italian computer scientist, currently working at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab (New York, USA) as an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. Education and career She received her bachelor ...

, biologist George Church, cosmologist

Saul Perlmutter Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ...

, astrophysicist

Sandra Faber Sandra Moore Faber (born December 28, 1944) is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works a ...

, theoretical physicist

Frank Wilczek Frank Anthony Wilczek (; born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Direct ...

, entrepreneur

, and actors and science communicators

Alan Alda Alan Alda (; born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo; January 28, 1936) is an American actor, screenwriter, and director. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he is best known for playing Captain Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce in the war co ...

and

Morgan Freeman Morgan Freeman (born June 1, 1937) is an American actor, director, and narrator. He is known for his distinctive deep voice and various roles in a wide variety of film genres. Throughout his career spanning over five decades, he has received ...

(as well as cosmologist Stephen Hawking prior to his death in 2018).

Conferences

In 2014, the Future of Life Institute held its opening event at

: a panel discussion on "The Future of Technology: Benefits and Risks", moderated by

. The panelists were synthetic biologist George Church, geneticist

Ting Wu Chao-ting Wu (; born January 24, 1954) is an American molecular biologist. After training at Harvard Medical School in genetics with William Gelbart, at Stanford Medical School with David Hogness, and in a fellowship at Massachusetts General Ho ...

, economist

Andrew McAfee Andrew Paul McAfee (born ), a principal research scientist at MIT, is cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world. Life ...

, physicist and Nobel laureate

and Skype co-founder

. Since 2015, FLI has organised biannual conferences that bring together leading AI builders from academia and industry. To date, the following conferences have taken place: * "The Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges" conference in Puerto Rico (2015). The goal was to identify promising research directions that can help maximize the future benefits of AI. At the conference, the Institute circulated an open letter on AI safety which was subsequently signed by Stephen Hawking,

, and many artificial intelligence experts. * The Beneficial AI conference in Asilomar, California (2017), a private gathering of what ''The New York Times'' called "heavy hitters of A.I." (including

Yann LeCun Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor ...

, Elon Musk, and

Nick Bostrom Nick Bostrom ( ; sv, Niklas Boström ; born 10 March 1973) is a Swedish-born philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, and the rev ...

). The institute released a set of principles for responsible AI development that came out of the discussion at the conference, signed by

Yoshua Bengio Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de ...

, Yann LeCun, and many other AI researchers. These principles influenced the

regulation of artificial intelligence The regulation of artificial intelligence is the development of public sector policies and laws for promoting and regulating artificial intelligence (AI); it is therefore related to the broader regulation of algorithms. The regulatory and policy l ...

and subsequent initiatives, such as the

OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; french: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, ''OCDE'') is an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate e ...

Principles on Artificial Intelligence. * The beneficial AGI conference in Puerto Rico (2019). This meeting focused on long-term questions on ensuring that Artificial General Intelligence is beneficial to humanity.

Global research program

The FLI research program started in 2015 with an initial donation of $10 million from Elon Musk. Unlike typical AI research, this program is focused on making AI safer or more beneficial to society, rather than just more powerful. In this initial round, a total of $7 million was awarded to 37 research projects. In July 2021, FLI announced that it would launch a new $25 million grant program with funding from the Russian–Canadian programmer

Vitalik Buterin Vitaly "Vitalik" Buterin (born 1994) is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer and founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding ''Bitcoin Magazine'' in 2011. In 2014, Buterin deployed Eth ...

In the media

* "The Fight to Define When AI is 'High-Risk'" in ''Wired''. * "Lethal Autonomous Weapons exist; They Must Be Banned" in

IEEE Spectrum ''IEEE Spectrum'' is a magazine edited by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The first issue of ''IEEE Spectrum'' was published in January 1964 as a successor to ''Electrical Engineering''. The magazine contains peer-revie ...

. * "United States and Allies Protest U.N. Talks to Ban Nuclear Weapons" in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

''. * "Is Artificial Intelligence a Threat?" in ''

The Chronicle of Higher Education ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals (staff members and administrators). A subscription is required to rea ...

'', including interviews with FLI founders

and Viktoriya Krakovna. * "But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me?", an interview with

on the ideas behind FLI in ''

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

''. *

References

External links

* {{Existential risk from artificial intelligence Futures studies organizations 2014 establishments in Massachusetts Research institutes established in 2014 Artificial intelligence associations Transhumanist organizations Existential risk organizations Existential risk from artificial general intelligence Organizations associated with effective altruism