Activity Update - September 2017
BERI has been shifting gears somewhat, and we thought it would be helpful to our collaborators and supporters to start a monthly blog post series. Each blog post will briefly describe some of what we’ve been up to each month and hopefully shed light on how our priorities shift over time. Note that some of our time each month will be spent investigating future project opportunities that may not be covered in these posts until our plans are more solid.
Accomplishments
This September, we decided on the preliminary structure of our grants program (announced here).
As mentioned in the announcement, we also made our first two grants (one to MIRI, and one to FLI).
We helped organize an event hosting Max Tegmark at UC Berkeley, in which Prof. Tegmark spoke about his latest book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Approximately 100-200 students attended.
Works in progress
We are...
In discussions with several professors about how BERI can support their research activities. There appear to be several promising opportunities for collaboration, and we have commenced researching our options with regard to these opportunities.
Developing a scholarship program, which we expect will primarily support graduate students doing x-risk relevant research at top universities who have a track record of demonstrated personal interest in reducing existential risk. We expect to have an application for such scholarships available on our website in the next month.
Recruiting engineers for trial projects to collaborate with academics on x-risk relevant work.
Other Updates
We have learned more about what kinds of services BERI can and cannot provide in the course of reducing existential risks. For example, there are certain types of “personal assistant” services that are difficult for BERI to provide to x-risk researchers, even if we were to be funded for those services by non-tax-exempt payments rather than donations. As such, we believe that other organizations with different legal structures may need to be created to fill gaps in the x-risk ecosystem that BERI cannot currently fill.