Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

End-of-Year Letter from Michael Vassar to Singularity Institute Supporters

I forgot to post this back on 11/24/09 when it was originally sent out to our mailing list.

Dear Friends of SIAI,

I’d like to share with you my picture of SIAI’s most recent year, of the global situation we are addressing, and of the work we can do with your help.

To put it bluntly, we are a small group of intelligent, ambitious, but as yet mostly inexperienced people who are working to increase the odds of an eventual positive Singularity and to decrease the odds of human extinction. Given our size and the size of the world, we’ve been reaching out to larger bodies of capable people. 2009 saw a number of successes in this regard: our Singularity Summit drew 800 attendees, including top academics who have remained in conversation about AI risks; Eliezer Yudkowsky finished a long-running series of posts laying out the concepts needed for thinking about AI risks, and started the successful online community Less Wrong; and we established a Visiting Fellows Program, which brought 14 researchers to Silicon Valley to do research and writing around AI risks and seeded ongoing focused full-time work.

Successes are useful in themselves. They are also indicators of what else can be achieved. In light of recent bridge-building to outside researchers and actors, we are fairly confident that we can turn even relatively small increases in donations into greater odds of an eventual positive singularity (basically: by continuing to do research and outreach in contact with capable people who may care). We wrote up many of the details of how we can do that on a new grant proposals site -- a site that lets you see exactly what proposed projects we’re thinking of, and how many dollars would let us do what to increase the odds of a positive long-run future.

If you care about humanity’s long-run future, and if you think SIAI is one of the more promising groups on the scene today, you’ll probably want to check out our proposed projects. Donate if you find a project worth funding or, if you don’t, share your thoughts on what else it is that would be worth funding. SIAI’s mission is ambitious but far from impossible; and spread across our staff and donor network we may have the seeds of a winning strategy.

Also, a Challenge Campaign is starting today, thanks to the generous support of Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik. Until February 28, 2010, each dollar donated to SIAI will be matched on a 1:1 basis, up to $100,000, for a total of $200,000. In this context, especially, every donation counts.

Please take a look, and consider putting your dollars into the effort that, as far as I can tell, can turn your dollars into more good than any other today.

http://singinst.org/challenge

Best regards,

Michael Vassar,
President, SIAI

P.S.: I’m not kidding when I say I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do email me.

P.P.S.: We’re still taking applications for our Visiting Fellows program. If you’re interested in working directly with SIAI, check out our program description, and send in an application.