Over at Less Wrong, Anna Salamon is putting out a call for skilled volunteers and potential interns for SIAI-funded summer projects.

Here’s the introductory paragraph:

Want to increase the odds that humanity correctly navigates whatever risks and promises artificial intelligence may bring? Interested in spending this summer in the SF Bay Area, working on projects and picking up background with similar others, with some possibility of staying on thereafter? Want to work with, and learn with, some of the best thinkers you’ll ever meet? – more specifically, some of the best at synthesizing evidence across a wide range of disciplines, and using it to make incremental progress on problems that are both damn slippery and damn important?

Having worked with this group last summer, I can say: Anna is not kidding! This group is extremely intelligent and well-read, and we discussed a wide range of concepts and issues, including those that had little to nothing to do with SIAI’s artificial intelligence focus. In this group, stellar standardized test scores (like perfect SATs and being in the top 10 in the state on math tests and science fairs) were the norm, but test scores fail to capture the complexity of intelligence in this group.

The summer visits were also interspersed with field trips to places like Google and Stanford.

Having attended multiple GATE programs during summers in my preteen and early teen years, where I practically learned more than all 15 years in normal school combined, I can say that SIAI’s summer intern program is even more enriching and memorable. I learned more in those six weeks than I did in all my summers at GATE.

Here are some of the projects which may occur if SIAI does end up taking summer interns:

* Improving technological forecasting around AI (with wide probability intervals, attention to the heuristics and biases literature, etc.);
* Writing academic conference/journal papers to seed academic literatures on questions around AI risks (e.g., takeoff speed, economics of AI software engineering, genie problems, what kinds of goal systems can easily arise and what portion of such goal systems would be foreign to human values; theoretical compsci knowledge would be helpful for many of these questions);
* Helping construct and/or test useful rationality curricula;
* Other activities that further our or relevant other actors’ understanding of what humanity is up against or how to address it — either directly, by research and writing on the topics themselves, or indirectly, by improvements in our individual or collective rationality.

Read the original post for more information and Anna’s email address.