Read the press release in Russian

Imagine how you’d react to the headline “Mutated coronavirus discovered, killing 30% of those infected.” Smallpox was such a lethal virus, estimated to have killed 500 million people in its last century. Today, the 41st anniversary of its eradication is celebrated by honoring two of the heroes who made it happen: Dr. William Foege and Dr. Viktor Zhdanov will share the $100,000 Future of Life Award in an online ceremony including Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci and freshly minted Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna.

The lessons learned from defeating smallpox are highly relevant to the covid pandemic: “We’re all indebted to Bill Foege and Viktor Zhdanov for their critical contributions to the eradication of smallpox, which demonstrated the immense value of science and international collaboration for fighting disease”, said António Guterres, Secretary General, United Nations. “Bill Foege’s advocacy of surveillance and containment (applying water to the house on fire rather than the whole neighborhood) was very significant for the overall success”, said Harvard professor George Church. “Bill played a pivotal role in eradicating smallpox and deserves the Future of Life Award. I look forward to seeing what the next generation of public health students will accomplish—by following in this giant’s footsteps”,  said Bill Gates. 

Viktor Zhdanov has been called “the best person who ever lived” by Oxford professor Will MacAskill, for successfully persuading the World Health Assembly to initiate an eradication campaign where the USA and the Soviet Union collaborated despite the Cold War. Dr. MacAskill added: “Smallpox was one of the worst diseases to ever befall the human race, and its eradication is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. Bill Foege and Viktor Zhdanov should be celebrated for their contributions, and should inspire us today to take effective action to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.” “They are phenomenal examples of what it means to harness science for global health”, Bill Gates added.

UNICEF estimates that smallpox eradication has saved close to 200 million lives – so far. “In selecting Bill Foege and Viktor Zhdanov as recipients of its prestigious 2020 award, the Future of Life Institute reminds us that seemingly impossible problems can be solved when science is respected, international collaboration is fostered, and goals are boldly defined. As we celebrate this achievement quarantined in our homes and masked outdoors, what message could be more obvious or more audacious?”, said Dr. Rachel Bronson, President & CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. George Church gives examples of such seemingly impossible problems: “Smallpox eradication is a model for elimination of other human-specific diseases in the future, such as polio, measles, mumps, rubella and syphilis.” 

While serving as the Soviet Union’s Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. Viktor Zhdanov persuasively argued at the Eleventh World Health Assembly meeting in 1958 that the world could eradicate smallpox within a decade with a united effort, and successfully lobbied the Soviet Union to donate 25 million doses of the smallpox vaccine to kickstart the effort in developing countries. The World Health Assembly accepted his proposal in 1959 under Resolution WHA11.54. Viktor Zhdanov passed away in 1987, and his award will be received by his sons Viktor and Michael in his memory. 

While working for the Centers for Disease Control in Africa as Chief of the Smallpox Eradication Program, Dr. Bill Foege developed the highly successful surveillance and “ring vaccination” strategy to contain smallpox spread. This greatly reduced the number of vaccinations needed, ensuring that the limited resources available sufficed to make smallpox the first infectious disease to be eradicated in human history. 

About the Future of Life Award

The award: The Future of Life Award honors those who take exceptional measures to safeguard the collective future of humanity. The 2017 award honored Vasili Arkhipov for single-handedly preventing a Soviet nuclear attack against the US in 1962, and the 2018 award celebrated Stanislav Petrov for helping avert an accidental nuclear war in 1983. The 2019 award honored Dr. Matthew Meselson for his remarkable contributions to getting biological weapons banned and focusing biology on curing rather than killing. The award is funded by Skype-cofounder Jaan Tallinn and presented by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit organization advocating positive technology use. “By eradicating smallpox and banning bioweapons, biology is a role model for other sciences struggling to help and not harm”, said FLI president  Max Tegmark. This dual nature of science was echoed by MIT biology Professor Jonathan King: “The victory over smallpox highlights both the power of science to help humanity, and also how science could do more good if we didn’t divert vast resources to developing new weapons of mass destruction. We need the world’s scientific community to draw inspiration from Foege and Zhdanov and press our political leaders to fund healthcare, not warfare.”

FLI’s Dr. Emilia Javorsky, a biotech entrepreneur, added: “As we embark on our journey to eradicate COVID in an environment plagued by mistrust and misinformation, Foege and Zhdanov have shown us that the seemingly impossible is possible. Their example illustrates the importance of rebuilding and restoring trust in science, between nations, and perhaps most powerfully, between each other.”

Videos about the award

On social media

What did people have to say about the 2020 Future of Life Award?

In the media

In Conversation with the Award Recipients

We recorded an episode of the Future of Life Institute Podcast with the award winners. Listen to it here:

Featured Books

Viktor Zhdanov—my Husband, Elena Tatulova’s Diary

Viktor Zhdanov’s wife (under the pseudonym of Elena) wrote a book about her husband’s life that the team at FLI has translated into English. It includes many fictitious names but tells a real story, and gives a taste of who Viktor Zhdanov was like as a person, while diving deeper into his work. You can read it here.

House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox by William Foege

A story of courage and risk-taking, House on Fire tells how smallpox, a disease that killed, blinded, and scarred millions over centuries of human history, was completely eradicated in a spectacular triumph of medicine and public health. Part autobiography, part mystery, the story is told by a man who was one of the architects of a radical vaccination scheme that became a key strategy in ending the horrible disease when it was finally contained in India. You can find the book on Amazon here.

On April 9th, Dr. Matthew Meselson received the $50,000 Future of Life Award at a ceremony at the University of Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs. Dr. Meselson was a driving force behind the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, an international ban that has prevented one of the most inhumane forms of warfare known to humanity. April 9th marked the eve of the Convention’s 47th anniversary.

Meselson’s long career is studded with highlights: proving Watson and Crick’s hypothesis on DNA structure, solving the Sverdlovsk Anthrax mystery, ending the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But it is above all his work on biological weapons that makes him an international hero.

“Through his work in the US and internationally, Matt Meselson was one of the key forefathers of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention,” said Daniel Feakes, Chief of the Biological Weapons Convention Implementation Support Unit. “The treaty bans biological weapons and today has 182 member states. He has continued to be a guardian of the BWC ever since. His seminal warning in 2000 about the potential for the hostile exploitation of biology foreshadowed many of the technological advances we are now witnessing in the life sciences and responses which have been adopted since.”

Meselson became interested in biological weapons during the 60s, while employed with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. It was on a tour of Fort Detrick, where the U.S. was then manufacturing anthrax, that he learned the motivation for developing biological weapons: they were cheaper than nuclear weapons. Meselson was struck, he says, by the illogic of this — it would be an obvious national security risk to decrease the production cost of WMDs.

The use of biological weapons was already prohibited by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, an international treaty that the U.S. had never ratified. So Meselson wrote a paper, “The United States and the Geneva Protocol,” outlining why it should do so. Meselson knew Henry Kissinger, who passed his paper along to President Nixon, and by the end of 1969 Nixon renounced biological weapons.

Next came the question of toxins — poisons derived from living organisms. Some of Nixon’s advisors believed that the U.S. should renounce the use of naturally derived toxins, but retain the right to use artificial versions of the same substances. It was another of Meselson’s papers, “What Policy for Toxins,” that led Nixon to reject this arbitrary distinction and to renounce the use of all toxin weapons.

On Meselson’s advice, Nixon had resubmitted the Geneva Protocol to the Senate for approval. But he also went beyond the terms of the Protocol — which only ban the use of biological weapons — to renounce offensive biological research itself. Stockpiles of offensive biological substances, like the anthrax that Meselson had discovered at Fort Detrick, were destroyed.

Once the U.S. adopted this more stringent policy, Meselson turned his attention to the global stage. He and his peers wanted an international agreement stronger than the Geneva Protocol, one that would ban stockpiling and offensive research in addition to use and would provide for a verification system. From their efforts came the Biological Weapons Convention, which was signed in 1972 and is still in effect today.

“Thanks in significant part to Professor Matthew Meselson’s tireless work, the world came together and banned biological weapons, ensuring that the ever more powerful science of biology helps rather than harms humankind. For this, he deserves humanity’s profound gratitude,” said former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

Meselson has said that biological warfare “could erase the distinction between war and peace.” Other forms of war have a beginning and an end — it’s clear what is warfare and what is not. Biological warfare would be different: “You don’t know what’s happening, or you know it’s happening but it’s always happening.”

And the consequences of biological warfare can be greater, even, than mass destruction; Attacks on DNA could fundamentally alter humankind. FLI honors Matthew Meselson for his efforts to protect not only human life but also the very definition of humanity.

Said Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees, “Matt Meselson is a great scientist — and one of very few who have been deeply committed to making the world safe from biological threats. This will become a challenge as important as the control of nuclear weapons — and much more challenging and intractable. His sustained and dedicated efforts fully deserve wider acclaim.”

“Today biotech is a force for good in the world, associated with saving rather than taking lives, because Matthew Meselson helped draw a clear red line between acceptable and unacceptable uses of biology”, added MIT Professor and FLI President Max Tegmark. “This is an inspiration for those who want to draw a similar red line between acceptable and unacceptable uses of artificial intelligence and ban lethal autonomous weapons.

To learn more about Matthew Meselson, listen to FLI’s two-part podcast featuring him in conversation with Ariel Conn and Max Tegmark. In Part One, Meselson describes how he helped prove Watson and Crick’s hypothesis of DNA structure and recounts the efforts he undertook to get biological weapons banned. Part Two focuses on three major incidents in the history of biological weapons and the role played by Meselson in resolving them.

Publications

Publications by Meselson include:

• “The replication of DNA in Escherichia coli,” detailing the experiment Meselson designed to prove Watson and Crick’s hypothesis of DNA structure and replication
• “The Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak of 1979,” outlining the conclusions of Meselson’s investigation into the outbreak
• “Preliminary Report — Herbicide Assessment Commission of the American Association for the Advancement of Science” and “Background Material Relevant to Presentations at the 1970 Annual Meeting of the AAAS,” explaining Meselon’s recommendation against the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam
• “Yellow Rain” and “The Yellow Rain Affair: Lessons from a Discredited Allegation,” describing Meselson’s investigation into allegations of chemical weapons use in Laos and Kampuchea

In the media

• ‘Matthew Meselson Receives 2019 Future of Life Award‘ at Harvard.edu
• ‘The man who stopped America’s biological weapons program‘ at Vox
• ‘Matthew Meselson Receives Future of Life Award for Work to Ban Bioweapons‘ at Harvard Belfer Center
• ‘Matthew S. Meselson Honored with the 2019 Future of Life Award for BWC Role‘ at Harvard Belfer Center

Program

We are so thrilled that you have chosen to spend next weekend with us at AIS, asking big questions about the future of AI and imagining and planning how to steer us toward a future that supports human flourishing.

This is a brand new kind of AI summit, convening some of the top minds in the field with a diverse range of expert perspectives to collaborate on the imagining and planning process for deployment, alignment and AI destinations. Our biggest question: how can we create our future with intelligence AND wisdom?

Agenda

All sessions are in Outlook 101 | All meals are at the Kitchen Table | Check-in is at the Lodge.

Agenda is subject to change.

Thursday, March 28th

2:00pm: Check-in opens

5:30-7pm: Dinner

7:30-7:55pm: Keynote: Modeling, Simulation & Changing the Rules of the Game | Gaia Dempsey, 7th Future

7:55-8:00pm: Welcome Remarks | Anthony Aguirre, Future of Life Institute

8:00-9:00pm: World Building Breakout: “A Day in Life” Exercise

Description: Small groups of 5 to 7 participants imagine a day in the life of a character they co-create that lives on Earth 2045. The goal of the exercise is to encourage participants to place themselves within the experience of Earth 2045, get familiar with the practice of creating a fictional future, and get to know each other (break the ice). A volunteer from each group will take notes on butcher paper.

Key Themes: Experiential Introduction to Earth 2045, Creativity + Specificity

Friday, March 29th

7:00-8:45am: Breakfast at the Kitchen Table

9:00-9:05am: Morning Remarks: Outline Sessions for the Day | Anthony Aguirre

9:05-9:10am: Introduction from Session Chair | Jingying Yang, Partnership on AI

9:10-9:40am: Keynote: AI Futures – Where Are We Headed and How Do We Steer? | Stuart Russell, Center for Human Compatible AI, UC Berkeley

Description: Stuart will frame the problem we are working to solve at AIS, namely that advanced AI technology represents a vast amplifying capacity for human beings that could veer into dangerous uncharted territory with vast societal implications.

9:40-10:10am: Genomics and the Evolution of the Mind | David Haussler, Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), UC Santa Cruz

Description: We are currently only what evolution made us. But technology is changing this. Our interactions with the Internet, with AI and with each other on a global scale are changing how our minds work. To understand where we might go, we need to first understand where we came from. I will briefly overview 3.8 billion years of genome evolution and mention some changes in our genomes in the last 3 million years that made our brains different from those of our ancestors. Next we need to understand where we are now. I’ll briefly discuss how we are attempting to address our current state of ignorance about how our minds work by growing human and chimpanzee cerebral organoids in a dish. Finally I will close with some speculations about the future of brain-machine interactions.

10:10-10:40am: Coffee Break

10:40-11:00am: Introduction to World Building as a “Mechanical Turk” modeling process | Anthony Aguirre

Key Theme: Detailed Introduction to Earth 2045, Purpose of World Building

11:00-12:30pm: Small Group Breakout: System World Building Exercise (If This, Then What, So What, How did we get there) | Ariel Conn

Description: Small groups of 5 to 7 participants collaborate on describing the systems that would need to be in place on Earth 2045 to move toward their aspirational vision. Each group (approx. 15 total) focuses on a particular lens, such as neuroethics, democratic processes, economic justice, education, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.

Key Theme: Earth 2045 system descriptions across culture, nature and infrastructure

12:30-1:45pm: Lunch at the Kitchen Table

2:00-2:30pm: What’s the Future of Criminal Justice? | Peter Eckersley, Partnership on AI

2:30-3:30pm: Synthesis Session | Facilitator TBD

Description: Facilitation of the large group, sharing and combining the insights they developed in the system-building exercise, identifying areas of confluence and conflict. The evolving description of Earth 2045 is enriched, including a unified timeline of events.

Key Theme: Synthesis

3:30-4:00pm: Afternoon Coffee Break

4:00-5:30pm: Red Teaming/Blue Teaming Earth 2045 ­| Allison Duettmann, Lou Viquerat, Foresight Institute

Description: After a brief intro to XHope, Red Teams and Blue Teams are created to attack and defend Earth 2045.

Key Theme: Stress testing

5:30-7:00pm: Dinner at the Kitchen Table

Saturday, March 30th

7:00-8:45am: Breakfast at the Kitchen Table

9:00-9:05am: Saturday Opening Remarks | Gaia Dempsey

9:05-9:10am: Introduction from Session Chair | Kyle Robertson, The Humanities Institute, UCSC

9:10-9:40am: Keynote: Complex Adaptive System Modeling: Origins and Applications | David Krakauer, Santa Fe Institute

Description: David will orient us toward solution paths for the problem Stuart outlined on Friday, namely the power of systems thinking for improving our understanding of the world, as well as our decision making, long-term thinking, and coordination capacity.

9:40-10:10am: Keynote: The Value of Non-Zero Sum Dynamics | Michael Page, Center for Security and Emerging Technology

10:10-10:40am: Coffee Break

10:40-11:00am: Keynote: System 1 and System 2 Thinking Cycles | Shahar Avin, Center for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge

11:00am-12:30pm Scenario Simulation | Facilitated by Shahar Avin, CSER

Description: Groups of people on Earth 2045 pursue goals and report back if they are successful. (Similar to a D&D quest).

Key Theme: Emergent outcomes, experiential understanding

12:30-1:45pm: Lunch at the Kitchen Table

2:00-2:30pm Keynote: Redefining Social Welfare: Bridging Preferences Across an Impossible Chasm | Marc Fleurbaey, University Center for Human Values, Princeton

Description: Marc will provide an overview of contemporary economic theories of justice and introduce us to the most important and promising ideas for social progress identified by the International Panel on Social Progress on structural and systemic issues for the long-term future. Finally, Marc will explore new potential solutions that become viable in economies powered by advanced AI.

2:30-3:30pm: Ideation Session: What is needed to move toward your aspirational vision of Earth 2045?

Description: Hackathon-style 1-minute pitches, group formation and collaboration. Groups focus on a specific system or opportunity they have uncovered during their world building and role-playing exercises.  

Key Theme: Solution generation

3:30-4:00pm: Afternoon Coffee Break

4:00-5:30pm: Small Group Working Session

Key Theme: Solution generation

5:30-7:00pm: Dinner at the Kitchen Table

Sunday, March 31st

7:00-8:45am: Breakfast at the Kitchen Table

9:00-9:05: Sunday Opening Remarks | Gaia Dempsey

9:05-9:10am: Introduction from Session Chair | Chair TBD

9:10-9:40am: Keynote: Tools and Human Co-Evolution | Max Tegmark, Professor of Physics, MIT and FLI Co-Founder

9:40-10:10am Global Ethics in AI Development | Marie-Therese Png, Oxford

10:10-11:30am: Hackathon Groups Present

Description: Groups share their ideas that they’ve worked on since Saturday afternoon.

11:30-12:00pm: Next Steps for Projects and Closing Remarks

12:00-1:30pm: Lunch at the Kitchen Table

Departure

Materials

Please familiarize yourself with these before you arrive. 

Introduction to Earth 2045

Meet Earth 2045.

The model world of 2045 being explored at AIS, denoted “Earth 2045” for brevity, is defined by a number of assumptions. These are not predictions, nor necessarily goals, but rather just defining characteristics of the plausible and aspirational but fictional world we are fleshing out and investigating at the Summit.

We have 5 small group exercise throughout the summit that relate to Earth 2045. Please familiarize yourself with it so that you can participate fully.

Download Here

Community Guidelines

Our community guidelines were created by our partner, Partnership in AI. Please read them before the event.

Download Here

This summit is operating under the Chatham House Rule. When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

Location

1440 Multiversity | 800 Bethany Drive, Scotts Valley, CA 95066

Reservations:
+1-888-727-1440
General Inquiries:
+1-844-544-1440

Transportation Suggestions

Download Here

Augmented Intelligence Summit

Speakers

Anthony Aguirre, PhD

UC Santa Cruz | Future of Life Institute | Foundational Questions Institute

Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist and a Harvard-trained professor of physics at the  University of California, Santa Cruz. He cofounded and is the associate scientific director of the nonprofit organization  Foundational Questions Institute and is the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute.

He received his doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University in 2000 and then spent three years as a member of the  Institute for Advanced Study  in Princeton, New Jersey, before accepting a professorship in the physics department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He has worked on a wide variety of topics in theoretical cosmology (the study of the formation, nature, and evolution of the universe), including the early universe and inflation, gravity physics, first stars, the intergalactic medium, galaxy formation, and black holes.

Shahar Avin

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

Shahar Avin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He works with CSER researchers and others in the global catastrophic risk community to identify and design risk prevention strategies, through organizing workshops, building agent-based models, and by frequently asking naive questions.

Prior to CSER, Shahar worked at Google for a year as a mobile/web software engineer. His PhD was in philosophy of science, on the allocation of public funds to research projects. His undergrad was in physics and philosophy of science, which followed his mandatory service in the IDF.

Meia Chita-Tegmark

Tufts School of Engineering | Future of Life Institute

Meia Chita-Tegmark is a postdoctoral researcher working on human-robot interactions at the Tufts School of Engineering. She did her M.Ed. at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her Ph.D. in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University, focusing on a variety of topics in developmental psychology, such as atypical social development, attention mechanisms and learning strategies.

Meia has strong interests in the future of humanity and big picture questions, and she is a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute.

Ariel Conn

Future of Life Institute

Ariel Conn is the Director of Media and Outreach for the Future of Life Institute. She oversees online outreach and communication efforts, as well as leading collaboration efforts with other organisations. Her work covers a range of fields, including artificial intelligence (AI) safety, AI policy, lethal autonomous weapons, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, and climate change.

Ariel has degrees in English, physics, and geophysics and she’s worked with NASA, the Idaho National Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, MIT, and Virginia Tech.

Gaia Dempsey

7th Future

Gaia Dempsey is an entrepreneur and pioneer in the field of augmented reality (AR). She was a cofounder and former managing director at DAQRI, an augmented reality hardware and software company that delivers a complete professional AR platform to the industrial and enterprise market.

Gaia is currently the founder and CEO of 7th Future, a consultancy that partners and co-invests with technology leaders and communities to build and launch global-impact innovation models, with a commitment to openness, integrity, resilience, and long-term thinking.

Allison Duettmann

Foresight Institute

Allison Duettmann is a researcher and program coordinator at Foresight Institute, a non-profit institute for technologies of fundamental importance for the future of life. Her research focuses on the reduction of existential risks, especially from artificial general intelligence.

At Existentialhope.com, she keeps a curated map of resources, organizations and people working toward positive long-term futures for life. The project is collaborative and for everyone who wants to work toward grand futures but doesn’t know where to start. Allison speaks and moderates panels on existential risks and existential hope, AI safety, cybersecurity, longevity, blockchains, ethics in technology, and more.

Allison holds an MS in Philosophy & Public Policy from the London School of Economics, where she developed an ethical framework for AGI that relies on Rawl’s Reflective Equilibrium and NLP.

Peter Eckersley

Partnership on AI

Peter Eckersley is Director of Research at the Partnership on AI, a collaboration between the major technology companies, civil society and academia to ensure that AI is designed and used to benefit humanity. He leads PAI’s research on machine learning policy and ethics, including projects within PAI itself and projects in collaboration with the Partnership’s extensive membership.

Peter’s AI research interests are broad, including measuring progress in the field, figuring out how to translate ethical and safety concerns into mathematical constraints, and setting sound policies around high-stakes applications such as self-driving vehicles, recidivism prediction, cybersecurity, and military applications of AI.

Prior to PAI, Peter was Chief Computer Scientist at EFF, and led a team that worked on numerous computer security, privacy and Internet policy topics.

Marc Fleurbaey

Princeton

Marc is the Robert E. Kuenne Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, and a professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

David Haussler, PhD

UC Santa Cruz | California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences

David Haussler serves as the Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). He is also the scientific co-director for the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research.

Dr. Haussler’s research lies at the interface of mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology and involves developing new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular evolution of the human genome. He played a leading role in developing the new field of computational biology. He leads the Genome Bioinformatics Group, which designed and built the program that assembled the first working draft of the human genome sequence and posted it on the internet.

David Krakauer

Santa Fe Institute

David’s research explores the evolution of intelligence on earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties.

David served as the founding Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and Professor of Mathematical Genetics all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

David has been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara, a long-term Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and visiting Professor of Evolution at Princeton University.
In 2012 he was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people “who will change the world.”
In 2016 Krakauer was included in Entrepreneur Magazine’s visionary Leaders advancing global research and business.

Michael Page

Center for Security and Emerging Technology

Michael focuses on the long-term social implications of the development and use of advanced artificial intelligence systems. He is policy and ethics advisor at OpenAI a nonprofit AI research company, dedicated to charting a path to safe AI.

Marie-Therese Png

Oxford Internet Institute | DeepMind

Marie-Therese Png is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and PhD research intern at DeepMind Ethics and Society. Her research focuses are Globally Beneficial AI, Intercultural AI Ethics, and Global Justice.

Previously, Marie-Therese was Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded Implikit.org, a neurotechnology project addressing implicit bias, and coordinated the community focused global biohacking movement at the MIT BioSummit. She was AI Policy Research Associate at the Harvard Artificial Intelligence Initiative, building the Global Civic Debate on AI, and the World Government Summit AI Roundtable. Marie-Therese holds a Master’s from Harvard in Developmental Cognition and Intergroup conflict.

Stuart Russell, PhD

UC Berkeley | Center for Human-Compatible AI

Stuart Russell is a renowned professor and former chair of the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, he holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in engineering and is the director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is working on developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty for the United Nations.

Dr. Russell’s research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence (AI) including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, and AI’s philosophical foundations. His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity.

Max Tegmark

MIT | Future of Life Institute

Max Tegmark is a professor doing AI and physics research at MIT, and advocates for positive use of technology as president of the Future of Life Institute. He is the author of over 200 publications as well as the books “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality”.

Lou Viquerat de Kerhuelvez

Foresight Institute

Lou is the Director of Development at Foresight Institute. There, Lou grows a community dedicated to reflecting on the perils and promises of technologies of fundamental importance for life and the biosphere, focusing in particular on artificial intelligence, biotechnology and cybersecurity. Lou’s research focuses on alternative governance, justice, and economic systems for a more collaborative, sustainable, and global future society.

Today many of the concepts, consequences, and possibilities involved in a future with advanced AI feel distant, uncertain, and abstract. No one has all the answers about how to ensure that powerful AI in the future is beneficial, either in terms of technical implementation or in terms of transference to the domains of law, regulations and policy, industry best practices, or society at large. There are a number of organizations and initiatives that are working on the issues of AI safety, ethics, and governance.

Joining these efforts with a distinct role that bridges academia and industry, the Augmented Intelligence Summit offers a unique, inter-disciplinary approach to learning and creating solutions in this space. We ask: is it possible to develop a collective, concrete, realistic vision of a positive AI future that can inform policy, the development of the industry, and academic research, and can it be done inclusively? Our hypothesis is that this is indeed possible, and we have designed an experiment to test it.

The Summit will provide the tools and framework for a multi-disciplinary group of policy, research, and business leaders to imagine and interact with a simulated model of a positive future for our global society and its major interconnected systems – the economy, education, work, and political structures – through the lens of advanced AI. AIS utilizes a range of collaborative design tools and immersive exercises, including:

• Scenario simulation, war-game style
• World building and collaborative strategic planning exercises
• Presentations on models of economic, social and complex systems to inform our work

The Summit’s high-level goals are about increasing systems-literacy and improving long-term thinking and decision making, which we see as critical skills for navigating the future of advanced AI and its impact on society. In addition to presentations on the state of AI and its trajectory, immersive exercises at the Summit relate to a fictional future world with advanced AI that is both plausible and aspirational. By mentally committing to a specific version of the future, our creativity, our ability to identify important variables, and our overall problem-solving capacity can be enhanced to help us better imagine the societal challenges, opportunities, and needs that will face us and the planning that must be done.

Featured Speakers

Max Tegmark

MIT | FLI

David Krakauer

Santa Fe Institute

Allison Duettmann

Foresight Institute

Stuart Russell

UC Berkeley | CHAI

Gaia Dempsey

7th Future

Peter Eckersley

Partnership on AI

Marie-Therese Png

Oxford | DeepMind

Anthony Aguirre

UC Santa Cruz | FLI | FXQi

Marc Fleurbaey

Princeton

Ariel Conn

FLI

Michael Page

OpenAI

Meia Chita-Tegmark

Tufts | FLI

David Haussler

UC Santa Cruz | QB3

Shahar Avin

CSER

Special performance by

Tim Fain

Bios for the speakers can be found here.

APPLY NOW

Agenda

Thursday, March 28th

Performance | Tim Fain

Tim Fain is an American violinist, best known for his performances in the movies 12 Years a Slave and Black Swan and for his work with renowned composer Philip Glass.

Opening Keynote: Modeling, Simulation & Changing the Rules of the Game | Gaia Dempsey

Gaia Dempsey is an entrepreneur and pioneer in the field of augmented reality (AR). She is the founder and CEO of 7th Future, a consultancy that partners and co-invests with technology leaders and communities to build and launch global-impact innovation models.

World Building Breakout: “A Day in the Life” Exercise

Small groups imagine a day in the life of a character they co-create that lives on a plausible, aspirational version of Earth in 2045, which we’ve named Planet 7. The goal of the exercise is to encourage participants to place themselves within the experience of Planet 7, get familiar with the practice of creating a fictional future, and get to know each other (break the ice).

Friday, March 29th

Keynote: AI Futures — Where Are We Headed and How Do We Steer? | Stuart Russell

Stuart will frame the problem we are working to solve at AIS, namely that advanced AI technology represents a vast amplifying capacity for human beings that could veer into dangerous uncharted territory with vast societal implications.

Stuart is a renowned professor and former chair of the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, he holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in engineering and is the director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI.

What’s the Future of Healthcare? | David Haussler

David will present a vision of a plausible, aspirational healthcare system could look like by 2045.

David Haussler serves as the Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). He is also the scientific co-director for the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research.

Introduction to World Building | Anthony Aguirre

Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist and a Harvard-trained professor of physics at the  University of California, Santa Cruz. He cofounded and is the associate scientific director of the nonprofit organization  Foundational Questions Institute and is the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute.

World Building Breakout: Designing Interconnected Systems | Ariel Conn

Small groups collaborate on describing the systems that would need to be in place on Planet 7 to move toward their aspirational vision. Each group focuses on a particular lens, such as neuroethics, democratic processes, economic justice, education, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.

Ariel Conn is the Director of Media and Outreach for the Future of Life Institute. Her work covers a range of fields, including artificial intelligence (AI) safety, AI policy, lethal autonomous weapons, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, and climate change.

What’s the Future of Criminal Justice? | Peter Eckersley

Peter is Director of Research at the Partnership on AI, a collaboration between the major technology companies, civil society and academia to ensure that AI is designed and used to benefit humanity. He leads PAI’s research on machine learning policy and ethics.

Synthesis Session

Facilitation of the large group, sharing and combining the insights they developed in the system-building exercise, identifying areas of confluence and conflict. The evolving description of Planet 7 is enriched, including a unified timeline of events.

War Game Simulation ­| Allison Duettmann

The session begins with an “Intro to Existential Hope & Strengthening Civilization” talk from Allison. Next, Red Teams and Blue Teams are created to attack and defend Planet 7 in multiple rounds.

Allison is a researcher and program coordinator at Foresight Institute, a non-profit institute for technologies of fundamental importance for the future of life. Her research focuses on the reduction of existential risks, especially from artificial general intelligence. 

Saturday, March 30th

Keynote: Complex Adaptive System Modeling — Origins and Applications | David Krakauer

David will orient us toward solution paths for the problem Stuart outlined on Friday, namely the power of systems thinking for improving our understanding of the world, as well as our decision making, long-term thinking, and coordination capacity.

David is President and Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. His research explores the evolution of intelligence on earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties.

Keynote: The Value of Non-Zero Sum Dynamics | Michael Page

Michael focuses on the long-term social implications of the development and use of advanced artificial intelligence systems. He is policy and ethics advisor at OpenAI a nonprofit AI research company, dedicated to charting a path to safe AI.

Keynote: TBD | Shahar Avin

Scenario Simulation | Shahar Avin

Groups of people on Planet 7 pursue goals and report back if they are successful. (Similar to a D&D quest).

Shahar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He works with CSER researchers and others in the global catastrophic risk community to identify and design risk prevention strategies.

Keynote: Redefining Social Welfare: Bridging Preferences Across an Impossible Chasm | Marc Fleurbaey

Marc will provide an overview of contemporary economic theories of justice and introduce us to the most important and promising ideas for social progress identified by the International Panel on Social Progress on structural and systemic issues for the long-term future. Finally, Marc will explore new potential solutions that become viable in economies powered by advanced AI.

Marc is the Robert E. Kuenne Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, and a professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Sunday, March 31st

Keynote: TBD | Max Tegmark

Max is a professor doing AI and physics research at MIT, and advocates for positive use of technology as president of the Future of Life Institute.

Global Ethics in AI Development | Marie-Therese Png

Marie-Therese is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and PhD research intern at DeepMind Ethics and Society. Her research focuses are Globally Beneficial AI, Intercultural AI Ethics, and Global Justice.

APPLY NOW

Organizers

Anthony Aguirre, PhD

Physicist | Cofounder of Future of Life Institute | Cofounder of Foundational Questions Institute

Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist and a Harvard-trained professor of physics at the  University of California, Santa Cruz. He cofounded and is the associate scientific director of the nonprofit organization  Foundational Questions Institute and is the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute.

He received his doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University in 2000 and then spent three years as a member of the  Institute for Advanced Study  in Princeton, New Jersey, before accepting a professorship in the physics department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He has worked on a wide variety of topics in theoretical cosmology (the study of the formation, nature, and evolution of the universe), including the early universe and inflation, gravity physics, first stars, the intergalactic medium, galaxy formation, and black holes.

Gaia Dempsey

Founder & CEO of 7th Future

Gaia Dempsey is an entrepreneur and pioneer in the field of augmented reality (AR). She was a cofounder and former managing director at DAQRI, an augmented reality hardware and software company that delivers a complete professional AR platform to the industrial and enterprise market.

Gaia is currently the founder and CEO of 7th Future, a consultancy that partners and co-invests with technology leaders and communities to build and launch global-impact innovation models, with a commitment to openness, integrity, resilience, and long-term thinking.

William Dolphin

CEO of CueSquared

Dr. William Dolphin is an accomplished chief executive officer and senior executive with a history of leading the management and operations of international private and public companies in a range of industries including biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device, and information technology.

Currently, he is chief executive officer at CueSquared, which brings developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning to bear on healthcare applications—in particular, to expedite business processes, facilitate access to healthcare, and improve outcomes.

Dr. Dolphin brings a wealth of knowledge and an extensive history of building and growing successful, global businesses, especially to facilitate the delivery of healthcare and improved patient outcomes. He has served as chief executive officer of numerous medical and information technology companies around the world including Omedix, SonaMed Corporation, SpectraNet Ltd., Visiomed Group, and Avita Medical. Additionally, Dr. Dolphin has served as a member of the board of directors for over a dozen public and private companies worldwide.

Tasha McCauley

Board Director of GeoSim Systems

Tasha McCauley is a technology entrepreneur and robotics expert. She is board director at GeoSim Systems, a company centering on a new technology that produces high-resolution, fully interactive virtual models of cities. This novel approach to “reality capture” yields the most detailed VR environments ever created out of data gathered from the real world.

Tasha is also the cofounder of Fellow Robots, a robotics company based at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Formerly on the faculty of Singularity University, she taught students about robotics and was director of the Autodesk Innovation Lab.

She sits on the board of directors of the Ten to the Ninth Plus Foundation, an organization empowering exponential technological change worldwide. Tasha enjoys building things and discovering how things work. She spends a lot of time thinking about how to make user interfaces that facilitate and enhance creativity.

In partnership with

Location

1440 Multiversity | Scotts Valley, CA

Redwood trails, copper-adorned buildings with majestic views, and decks built around sky-high trunks keep you wrapped in nature while on 1440 Multiversity’s 75-acre campus.

Part wellness resort, part Ted-talk auditorium, part conference center, the campus features state-of-the-art classrooms, meeting spaces, and accommodations tucked away in a lush forest between Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley. With locally sourced meals, holistic-health classes, Fitness Center, infinity-edge hot tub, and more, your stay at 1440 is designed to nurture, educate, and inspire.

APPLY NOW

Augmented Intelligence Summit

Steering the Future of AI

March 28 – 31, 2019 | 1440 Multiversity | Tuition $495

Today many of the concepts, consequences, and possibilities involved in a future with advanced AI feel distant, uncertain, and abstract. No one has all the answers about how to ensure that powerful AI in the future is beneficial, either in terms of technical implementation or in terms of transference to the domains of law, regulations and policy, industry best practices, or society at large. There are a number of organizations and initiatives that are working on the issues of AI safety, ethics, and governance.

Joining these efforts with a distinct role that bridges academia and industry, the Augmented Intelligence Summit offers a unique, inter-disciplinary approach to learning and creating solutions in this space. We ask: is it possible to develop a collective, concrete, realistic vision of a positive AI future that can inform policy, the development of the industry, and academic research, and can it be done inclusively? Our hypothesis is that this is indeed possible, and we have designed an experiment to test it.

The Summit will provide the tools and framework for a multi-disciplinary group of policy, research, and business leaders to imagine and interact with a simulated model of a positive future for our global society and its major interconnected systems – the economy, education, work, and political structures – through the lens of advanced AI. AIS utilizes a range of collaborative design tools and immersive exercises, including:

• Scenario simulation, war-game style
• World building and collaborative strategic planning exercises
• Presentations on models of economic, social and complex systems to inform our work

The Summit’s high-level goals are about increasing systems-literacy and improving long-term thinking and decision making, which we see as critical skills for navigating the future of advanced AI and its impact on society. In addition to presentations on the state of AI and its trajectory, immersive exercises at the Summit relate to a fictional future world with advanced AI that is both plausible and aspirational. By mentally committing to a specific version of the future, our creativity, our ability to identify important variables, and our overall problem-solving capacity can be enhanced to help us better imagine the societal challenges, opportunities, and needs that will face us and the planning that must be done.

Featured Speakers

Max Tegmark

MIT | FLI

David Krakauer

Santa Fe Institute

Allison Duettmann

Foresight Institute

Stuart Russell

UC Berkeley | CHAI

Gaia Dempsey

7th Future

Peter Eckersley

Partnership on AI

Marie-Therese Png

Oxford | DeepMind

Anthony Aguirre

UC Santa Cruz | FLI | FXQi

Marc Fleurbaey

Princeton

Ariel Conn

FLI

Michael Page

Center for Security and Emerging Technology

Meia Chita-Tegmark

Tufts | FLI

David Haussler

UC Santa Cruz | QB3

Shahar Avin

CSER

Lou Viquerat de Kerhuelvez

Foresight Institute

Bios for the speakers can be found here.

Agenda

Thursday, March 28th

5:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Opening Keynote: Modeling, Simulation & Changing the Rules of the Game | Gaia Dempsey

Gaia Dempsey is an entrepreneur and pioneer in the field of augmented reality (AR). She is the founder and CEO of 7th Future, a consultancy that partners and co-invests with technology leaders and communities to build and launch global-impact innovation models.

World Building Breakout: “A Day in the Life” Exercise

Small groups imagine a day in the life of a character they co-create that lives on a plausible, aspirational version of Earth in 2045, which we’ve named Earth 2045. The goal of the exercise is to encourage participants to place themselves within the experience of Earth 2045, get familiar with the practice of creating a fictional future, and get to know each other (break the ice).

Friday, March 29th

9:00 am – 9:00 pm

Keynote: AI Futures — Where Are We Headed and How Do We Steer? | Stuart Russell

Stuart will frame the problem we are working to solve at AIS, namely that advanced AI technology represents a vast amplifying capacity for human beings that could veer into dangerous uncharted territory with vast societal implications.

Stuart is a renowned professor and former chair of the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, he holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in engineering and is the director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI.

What’s the Future of Healthcare? | David Haussler

David will present a vision of a plausible, aspirational healthcare system could look like by 2045.

David Haussler serves as the Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). He is also the scientific co-director for the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research.

Introduction to World Building | Anthony Aguirre

Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist and a Harvard-trained professor of physics at the  University of California, Santa Cruz. He cofounded and is the associate scientific director of the nonprofit organization  Foundational Questions Institute and is the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute.

World Building Breakout: Designing Interconnected Systems | Ariel Conn

Small groups collaborate on describing the systems that would need to be in place on Earth 2045 to move toward their aspirational vision. Each group focuses on a particular lens, such as neuroethics, democratic processes, economic justice, education, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.

Ariel Conn is the Director of Media and Outreach for the Future of Life Institute. Her work covers a range of fields, including artificial intelligence (AI) safety, AI policy, lethal autonomous weapons, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, and climate change.

What’s the Future of Criminal Justice? | Peter Eckersley

Peter is Director of Research at the Partnership on AI, a collaboration between the major technology companies, civil society and academia to ensure that AI is designed and used to benefit humanity. He leads PAI’s research on machine learning policy and ethics.

Synthesis Session

Facilitation of the large group, sharing and combining the insights they developed in the system-building exercise, identifying areas of confluence and conflict. The evolving description of Earth 2045 is enriched, including a unified timeline of events.

War Game Simulation ­| Allison Duettmann & Lou Viquerat

The session begins with an “Intro to Existential Hope & Strengthening Civilization” talk from Allison. Next, Red Teams and Blue Teams are created to attack and defend Earth 2045 in multiple rounds.

Allison is a researcher and program coordinator at Foresight Institute, a non-profit institute for technologies of fundamental importance for the future of life. Her research focuses on the reduction of existential risks, especially from artificial general intelligence. 

Lou is the Director of Development at Foresight Institute. Lou’s research focuses on alternative governance, justice, and economic systems for a more collaborative, sustainable, and global future society.

Saturday, March 30th

9:00 am – 5:30 pm

Keynote: Complex Adaptive System Modeling — Origins and Applications | David Krakauer

David will orient us toward solution paths for the problem Stuart outlined on Friday, namely the power of systems thinking for improving our understanding of the world, as well as our decision making, long-term thinking, and coordination capacity.

David is President and Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. His research explores the evolution of intelligence on earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties.

Keynote: The Value of Non-Zero Sum Dynamics | Michael Page

Michael focuses on the long-term social implications of the development and use of advanced artificial intelligence systems. He is policy and ethics advisor at OpenAI a nonprofit AI research company, dedicated to charting a path to safe AI.

Keynote: TBD | Shahar Avin

Scenario Simulation | Shahar Avin

Groups of people on Earth 2045 pursue goals and report back if they are successful. (Similar to a D&D quest).

Shahar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He works with CSER researchers and others in the global catastrophic risk community to identify and design risk prevention strategies.

Keynote: Redefining Social Welfare: Bridging Preferences Across an Impossible Chasm | Marc Fleurbaey

Marc will provide an overview of contemporary economic theories of justice and introduce us to the most important and promising ideas for social progress identified by the International Panel on Social Progress on structural and systemic issues for the long-term future. Finally, Marc will explore new potential solutions that become viable in economies powered by advanced AI.

Marc is the Robert E. Kuenne Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, and a professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Sunday, March 31st

9:00 am – 1:30 pm

Keynote: TBD | Max Tegmark

Max is a professor doing AI and physics research at MIT, and advocates for positive use of technology as president of the Future of Life Institute.

Global Ethics in AI Development | Marie-Therese Png

Marie-Therese is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and PhD research intern at DeepMind Ethics and Society. Her research focuses are Globally Beneficial AI, Intercultural AI Ethics, and Global Justice.

Organizers

Anthony Aguirre, PhD

Physicist | Cofounder of Future of Life Institute | Cofounder of Foundational Questions Institute

Anthony Aguirre is a theoretical cosmologist and a Harvard-trained professor of physics at the  University of California, Santa Cruz. He cofounded and is the associate scientific director of the nonprofit organization  Foundational Questions Institute and is the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute.

He received his doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University in 2000 and then spent three years as a member of the  Institute for Advanced Study  in Princeton, New Jersey, before accepting a professorship in the physics department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He has worked on a wide variety of topics in theoretical cosmology (the study of the formation, nature, and evolution of the universe), including the early universe and inflation, gravity physics, first stars, the intergalactic medium, galaxy formation, and black holes.

Gaia Dempsey

Founder & CEO of 7th Future

Gaia Dempsey is an entrepreneur and pioneer in the field of augmented reality (AR). She was a cofounder and former managing director at DAQRI, an augmented reality hardware and software company that delivers a complete professional AR platform to the industrial and enterprise market.

Gaia is currently the founder and CEO of 7th Future, a consultancy that partners and co-invests with technology leaders and communities to build and launch global-impact innovation models, with a commitment to openness, integrity, resilience, and long-term thinking.

William Dolphin

CEO of CueSquared

Dr. William Dolphin is an accomplished chief executive officer and senior executive with a history of leading the management and operations of international private and public companies in a range of industries including biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device, and information technology.

Currently, he is chief executive officer at CueSquared, which brings developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning to bear on healthcare applications—in particular, to expedite business processes, facilitate access to healthcare, and improve outcomes.

Dr. Dolphin brings a wealth of knowledge and an extensive history of building and growing successful, global businesses, especially to facilitate the delivery of healthcare and improved patient outcomes. He has served as chief executive officer of numerous medical and information technology companies around the world including Omedix, SonaMed Corporation, SpectraNet Ltd., Visiomed Group, and Avita Medical. Additionally, Dr. Dolphin has served as a member of the board of directors for over a dozen public and private companies worldwide.

Tasha McCauley

Board Director of GeoSim Systems

Tasha McCauley is a technology entrepreneur and robotics expert. She is board director at GeoSim Systems, a company centering on a new technology that produces high-resolution, fully interactive virtual models of cities. This novel approach to “reality capture” yields the most detailed VR environments ever created out of data gathered from the real world.

Tasha is also the cofounder of Fellow Robots, a robotics company based at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Formerly on the faculty of Singularity University, she taught students about robotics and was director of the Autodesk Innovation Lab.

She sits on the board of directors of the Ten to the Ninth Plus Foundation, an organization empowering exponential technological change worldwide. Tasha enjoys building things and discovering how things work. She spends a lot of time thinking about how to make user interfaces that facilitate and enhance creativity.

In partnership with

Location

1440 Multiversity | Scotts Valley, CA

Redwood trails, copper-adorned buildings with majestic views, and decks built around sky-high trunks keep you wrapped in nature while on 1440 Multiversity’s 75-acre campus.

Part wellness resort, part Ted-talk auditorium, part conference center, the campus features state-of-the-art classrooms, meeting spaces, and accommodations tucked away in a lush forest between Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley. With locally sourced meals, holistic-health classes, Fitness Center, infinity-edge hot tub, and more, your stay at 1440 is designed to nurture, educate, and inspire.

Nearby Airports:

Mineta San Jose (SJC): 29 miles | approximately 40 – 60 minutes

San Fransisco (SFO): 60 miles | approximately 60 – 75 minutes

Oakland (OAK): 60 miles | approximately 60 – 90 minutes

Transportation suggestions to and from airports will be sent to registered participants prior to the event. 

BENEFICIAL AGI 2019

After our Puerto Rico AI conference in 2015 and our Asilomar Beneficial AI conference in 2017, we returned to Puerto Rico at the start of 2019 to talk about Beneficial AGI. We couldn’t be more excited to see all of the groups, organizations, conferences and workshops that have cropped up in the last few years to ensure that AI today and in the near future will be safe and beneficial. And so we now wanted to look further ahead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the classic goal of AI research, which promises tremendous transformation in society. Beyond mitigating risks, we want to explore how we can design AGI to help us create the best future for humanity.

We again brought together an amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, as well as thought leaders in economics, law, policy, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI. We hosted a two-day technical workshop to look more deeply at how we can create beneficial AGI, and we followed that with a 2.5-day conference, in which people from a broader AI background considered the opportunities and challenges related to the future of AGI and steps we can take today to move toward an even better future. Honoring the FrieNDA for the conference, we have only posted videos and slides below with approval of the speaker. (See the high-res group photo here.)

Conference Schedule

Friday, January 4

18:00 Early drinks and appetizers
19:00 Conference welcome reception & buffet dinner
20:00 Poster session

Saturday, January 5

Session 1 — Overview Talks

9:00 Welcome & summary of conference plan | FLI Team

Destination:

9:05 Framing the Challenge | Max Tegmark (FLI/MIT)
9:15 Alternative destinations that are popular with participants. What do you prefer?

Technical Safety:

10:00 Provably beneficial AI | Stuart Russell (Berkeley/CHAI) (pdf) (video)
10:30 Technical workshop summary | David Krueger (MILA) (pdf) (video)
10:50 Coffee break

11:00 Strategy/Coordination:

AI strategy, policy, and governance | Allan Dafoe (FHI/GovAI) (pdf) (video)
Towards a global community of shared future in AGI | Brian Tse (FHI) (pdf) (video)
Strategy workshop summary | Jessica Cussins (FLI) (pdf) (video)

12:00 Lunch
13:00 Optional breakouts & free time

Session 2 — Destination | Session Chair: Max Tegmark

16:00 Talk: Summary of discussions and polls about long-term goals, controversies

Panels on the controversies where the participant survey revealed the greatest disagreements:

16:10 Panel: Should we build superintelligence? (video)

Tiejun Huang (Peking)
Tanya Singh (FHI)
Catherine Olsson (Google Brain)
John Havens (IEEE)
Moderator: Joi Ito (MIT)

16:30 Panel: What should happen to humans? (video)

José Hernandez-Orallo (CFI)
Daniel Hernandez (OpenAI)
De Kai (ICSI)
Francesca Rossi (CSER)
Moderator: Carla Gomes (Cornell)

16:50 Panel: Who or what should be in control? (video)

Gaia Dempsey (7th Future)
El Mahdi El Mhamdi (EPFL)
Dorsa Sadigh (Stanford)
Moderator: Meia Chita-Tegmark (FLI)

17:10 Panel: Would we prefer AGI to be conscious? (video)

Bart Selman (Cornell)
Hiroshi Yamakawa (Dwango AI)
Helen Toner (GovAI)
Moderator: Andrew Serazin (Templeton)

17:30 Panel: What goal should civilization strive for? (video)

Joshua Greene (Harvard)
Nick Bostrom (FHI)
Amanda Askell (OpenAI)
Moderator: Lucas Perry (FLI)

18:00 Coffee & snacks
18:20 Panel: If AGI eventually makes all humans unemployable, then how can people be provided with the income, influence, friends, purpose, and meaning that jobs help provide today? (video)

Gillian Hadfield (CHAI/Toronto)
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)
James Manyika (McKinsey)
Moderator: Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT)

19:00 Dinner
20:00 Lightning talks

Sunday, January 6

Session 3 — Technical Safety | Session Chair: Victoria Krakovna

Paths to AGI:

9:00 Talk: Challenges towards AGI | Yoshua Bengio (MILA) (pdf) (video)
9:30 Debate: Possible paths to AGI (video)

Yoshua Bengio (MILA)
Irina Higgins (DeepMind)
Nick Bostrom (FHI)
Yi Zeng (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Moderator: Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT)

10:10 Coffee break

Safety research:

10:25 Talk: AGI safety research agendas | Rohin Shah (Berkeley/CHAI) (pdf) (video)
10:55 Panel: What are the key AGI safety research priorities? (video)

Scott Garrabrant (MIRI)
Daniel Ziegler (OpenAI)
Anca Dragan (Berkeley/CHAI)
Eric Drexler (FHI)
Moderator: Ramana Kumar (DeepMind)

11:30 Debate: Synergies vs. tradeoffs between near-term and long-term AI safety efforts (video)

Neil Rabinowitz (DeepMind)
Catherine Olsson (Google Brain)
Nate Soares (MIRI)
Owain Evans (FHI)
Moderator: Jelena Luketina (Oxford)

12:00 Lunch
13:00 Optional breakouts & free time
15:00 Coffee, snacks, & free time

Session 4 — Strategy & Governance | Session Chair: Anthony Aguirre

16:00 Talk: AGI emergence scenarios, and their relation to destination issues | Anthony Aguirre (FLI)
16:10 Debate: 4-way friendly debate – what would be the best scenario for AGI emergence and early use?

Helen Toner (FHI)
Seth Baum (GCRI)
Peter Eckersley (Partnership on AI)
Miles Brundage (OpenAI)
Moderator: Anthony Aguirre (FLI)

16:50 Talk: AGI – Racing and cooperating | Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh (CSER) (pdf) (video)
17:10 Panel: Where are opportunities for cooperation at the governance level? Can we identify globally shared goals? (video)

Jason Matheny (IARPA)
Charlotte Stix (CFI)
Cyrus Hodes (Future Society)
Bing Song (Berggruen)
Moderator: Danit Gal (Keio)

17:40 Coffee break
17:55 Panel: Where are opportunities for cooperation at the academic & corporate level? (video)

Jason Si (Tencent)
Francesca Rossi (CSER)
Andrey Ustyuzhanin (Higher School of Economics)
Martina Kunz (CFI/CSER)
Teddy Collins (DeepMind)
Moderator: Brian Tse (FHI)

18:25 Talks: Lightning support pitches
19:00 Banquet
20:00 Poster session

Monday, January 7

Session 5 — Action items

9:00 Group discussion and analysis of conference
9:45 Governance panel: What laws, regulations, institutions, and agreement are needed? (video)

Wendell Wallach (Yale)
Nicolas Miailhe (Future Society)
Helen Toner (FHI)
Jeff Cao (Tencent)
Moderator: Tim Hwang (Google)

10:15 Coffee break
10:30 Technical safety student panel: What does the next generation of researchers think that the action items should be? (video)

Jaime Fisac (Berkeley/CHAI)
William Saunders (Toronto)
Smitha Milli (Berkeley/CHAI)
El Mahdi El Mhamdi (EPFL)
Moderator: Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Berkeley/CHAI)

11:10 Prioritization: Everyone e-votes on how to rank and prioritize action items
11:30 Closing remarks

Early drinks & appetizers

Towards a global community of shared future in AGI | Brian Tse

Strategy workshop summary | Jessica Cussins

Panel: Should we build superintelligence?

AGI & Work Panel

Lightning talk | Francesca Rossi

Challenges towards AGI | Yoshua Bengio

AGI safety research agendas | Rohin Shah

AGI emergence scenarios, and their relation to destination issues | Anthony Aguirre

Panel: Where are opportunities for cooperation at the governance level?

Panel: Where are opportunities for cooperation at the academic & corporate level?

Governance Panel: What laws, regulations, institutions, and agreement are needed?

Closing remarks

Workshop Schedule

Wednesday, January 2

18:00 Workshop welcome reception, 3-word introductions

Thursday, January 3

9:00 Welcome & summary of workshop plan | FLI Team

Destination Session | Session Chair: Max Tegmark

9:15 Talk: Framing, breakout task assignment
9:30 Breakouts: Parallel group brainstorming sessions
10:45 Coffee break
11:00 Discussion: Destination group reports, debate between panel rapporteurs
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Optional breakouts & free time
15:00 Coffee, snacks, & free time

Technical Safety Session | Session Chair: Victoria Krakovna

16:00 Opening remarks

Talks about latest progress on human-in-the-loop approaches to AI safety 

16:05 Talk: Scalable agent alignment | Jan Leike (DeepMind) (pdf)
16:20 Talk: Iterated amplification and debate | Amanda Askell (OpenAI) (pdf)
16:35 Talk: Cooperative inverse reinforcement learning | Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Berkeley/CHAI)
16:50 Talk: The comprehensive AI services framework | Eric Drexler (FHI) (pdf)
17:05 Coffee break

Talks about latest progress on theory approaches to AI safety 

17:25 Talk: Embedded agency | Scott Garrabrant (MIRI) (pdf)
17:40 Talk: Measuring side effects | Victoria Krakovna (DeepMind) (pdf)
17:55 Talk: Verification/security/containment | Ramana Kumar (DeepMind) (pdf)
18:10 Coffee break
18:30 Debate: Will future AGI systems be optimizing a single long-term goal?

Rohin Shah (Berkeley/CHAI)
Peter Eckersley (Partnership on AI)
Anna Salamon (CFAR)
Moderator: David Krueger (MILA)

19:00 Dinner
20:30 Destinations groups finish their work as needed

Friday, January 4

Strategy Session | Session Chair: Anthony Aguirre

9:00 Welcome back & framing of strategy challenge
9:10 Talk: Exploring AGI scenarios | Shahar Avin (FHI) (pdf)
9:40 Forecasting: What scenario ingredients are most likely and why? What goes into answering this?

Jade Leung (FHI)
Danny Hernandez (OpenAI)
Gillian Hadfield (CHAI/Toronto)
Malo Bourgon (MIRI)
Moderator: Shahar Avin (FHI)

10:10 Coffee break
10:20 Scenario breakouts
11:20 Reports: Scenario report-backs & discussion panel(s), assignments to action item panels
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Optional breakouts & free time
15:00 Coffee & free time

Action Item Session

15:45 Panel: Destination synthesis – what did all groups agree on, and what are the key controversies worth clarifying? Action items?

Tegan Maharaj (MILA)
Alex Zhu (MIRI)

16:15 Panel: What might the unknown unknowns in the space of AI safety problems look like? How can we broaden our research agendas to capture them?

Jan Leike (DeepMind)
Victoria Krakovna (DeepMind)
Richard Mallah (FLI)
Moderator: Andrew Critch (Berkeley/CHAI)

16:45 Coffee break
17:00 Action items: What institutions, platforms, & organizations do we need?

Jaan Tallinn (CSER/FLI)
Tanya Singh (FHI)
Alex Zhu (MIRI)
Moderator: Allison Duettmann (Foresight)

17:30 Action items: What standards, laws, regulations, & agreements do we need?

Jessica Cussins (FLI)
Teddy Collins (DeepMind)
Gillian Hadfield (CHAI/Toronto)
Moderator: Allan Dafoe (FHI/GovAI)

18:00 Conference welcome reception & buffet dinner
20:00 Poster session

There are no videos from the workshop portion of the conference.

Welcome

Iterated amplification and debate | Amanda Askell

Measuring side effects | Victoria Krakovna

Exploring AGI scenarios | Shahar Avin

Forecasting: What scenario ingredients are most likely and why?

Panel: Destination synthesis

Action items: What institutions, platforms, & organizations do we need?

Organizers

Anthony Aguirre, Meia Chita-Tegmark, Ariel Conn, Tucker Davey, Victoria Krakovna, Richard Mallah, Lucas Perry, Lucas Sabor, Max Tegmark

Participants

Bios for the attendees and participants can be found here.

Click here to see this page in other languages:  German Russian 

To celebrate that today is not the 35th anniversary of World War III, Stanislav Petrov – the man who helped avert an all-out nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. on September 26 1983 – was honored in New York with the $50,000 Future of Life Award at a ceremony at the Museum of Mathematics in New York.

Former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said: “It is hard to imagine anything more devastating for humanity than all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Yet this might have occurred by accident on September 26 1983, were it not for the wise decisions of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. For this, he deserves humanity’s profound gratitude. Let us resolve to work together to realize a world free from fear of nuclear weapons, remembering the courageous judgement of Stanislav Petrov.”

Although the U.N. General Assembly, just blocks away, heard politicians highlight the nuclear threat from North Korea’s small nuclear arsenal, none mentioned the greater threat from the many thousands of nuclear weapons in the United States and Russian arsenals that have nearly been unleashed by mistake dozens of times in the past in a seemingly never-ending series of mishaps and misunderstandings.

One of the closest calls occurred thirty-five years ago, on September 26, 1983, when Stanislav Petrov chose to ignore the Soviet early-warning detection system that had erroneously indicated five incoming American nuclear missiles. With his decision to ignore algorithms and instead follow his gut instinct, Petrov helped prevent an all-out US-Russian nuclear war, as detailed in the documentary film “The Man Who Saved the World”, which will be released digitally next week. Since Petrov passed away last year, the award was collected by his daughter Elena. Meanwhile, Petrov’s son Dmitry missed his flight to New York because the U.S. embassy delayed his visa. “That a guy can’t get a visa to visit the city his dad saved from nuclear annihilation is emblematic of how frosty US-Russian relations have gotten, which increases the risk of accidental nuclear war”, said MIT Professor Max Tegmark when presenting the award. Arguably the only recent reduction in the risk of accidental nuclear war came when Donald Trump held a summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki earlier this year, which was, ironically, met with widespread criticism.

In Russia, soldiers often didn’t discuss their wartime actions out of fear that it might displease their government, and so, Elena only first heard about her father’s heroic actions in 1998 – 15 years after the event occurred. And even then, Elena and her brother only learned of what her father had done when a German journalist reached out to the family for an article he was working on. It’s unclear if Petrov’s wife, who died in 1997, ever knew of her husband’s heroism. Until his death, Petrov maintained a humble outlook on the event that made him famous. “I was just doing my job,” he’d say.

But most would agree that he went above and beyond his job duties that September day in 1983. The alert of five incoming nuclear missiles came at a time of high tension between the superpowers, due in part to the U.S. military buildup in the early 1980s and President Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric. Earlier in the month the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane that strayed into its airspace, killing almost 300 people, and Petrov had to consider this context when he received the missile notifications. He had only minutes to decide whether or not the satellite data were a false alarm. Since the satellite was found to be operating properly, following procedures would have led him to report an incoming attack. Going partly on gut instinct and believing the United States was unlikely to fire only five missiles, he told his commanders that it was a false alarm before he knew that to be true. Later investigations revealed that reflections of the Sun off of cloud tops had fooled the satellite into thinking it was detecting missile launches.

Last years Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Beatrice Fihn, who helped establish the recent United Nations treaty banning nuclear weapons, said, “Stanislav Petrov was faced with a choice that no person should have to make, and at that moment he chose the human race — to save all of us. No one person and no one country should have that type of control over all our lives, and all future lives to come. 35 years from that day when Stanislav Petrov chose us over nuclear weapons, nine states still hold the world hostage with 15,000 nuclear weapons. We cannot continue relying on luck and heroes to safeguard humanity. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provides an opportunity for all of us and our leaders to choose the human race over nuclear weapons by banning them and eliminating them once and for all. The choice is the end of us or the end of nuclear weapons. We honor Stanislav Petrov by choosing the latter.”

University College London Mathematics Professor  Hannah Fry, author of  the new book “Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms”, participated in the ceremony and pointed out that as ever more human decisions get replaced by automated algorithms, it is sometimes crucial to keep a human in the loop – as in Petrov’s case.

The Future of Life Award seeks to recognize and reward those who take exceptional measures to safeguard the collective future of humanity. It is given by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit also known for supporting AI safety research with Elon Musk and others. “Although most people never learn about Petrov in school, they might not have been alive were it not for him”, said FLI co-founder Anthony Aguirre. Last year’s award was given to the Vasili Arkhipov, who singlehandedly prevented a nuclear attack on the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis. FLI is currently accepting nominations for next year’s award.

Saturday sessions

• Continuing Dangers from Nuclear Weapons
  • Prof. Aron Bernstein, Prof. Elaine Scarry, Stephanie Savell.
• International Initiatives Toward Disarmament
  • Joseph Gerson, Hon. John Tierney, Charles Knight, Chuck Johnson, Jim Anderson (Chair).
• Political Initiatives
  • John Tierney, Medea Benjamin, Kristina Romines, Jonathan King, Andrea Miller (Chair).
• Campus Organizing for Peace & Justice: What Works? What Doesn’t? Where Next?
  • Campus Peace leaders including Caitlin Forbes (Mass Peace Action), Kate Alexander (Peace Action of NY), Eric Stolar (Fordham), Luisa Kenausis (MIT).
• Actions for the Coming Period: Shout Heard Round the World
  • Michelle Cunha, Poor Peoples 40 Day Campaign (Paul Johnson), Peace for Koreans (Mike Vanelzakker), Cole Harrison (Chair).

Workshops

• Resisting the Trillion dollar Nuclear Weapons Escalation
  • Prof. Gary Goldstein, Peter Casey, Prof. Heidi Garrett-Peltier, Richard Krushnic, Guntram Mueller (Chair).
• Congressional Budget-Civilian vs Pentagon
  • Subrata Ghoshroy, Andrea Miller, Stephanie Savell, Paul Shannon, Michelle Cunha (Chair).
• Don’t Bank on the Bomb Divestment Campaigns
  • William Hartung, Lucas Perry, State Rep. Mike Connolly, Medea Benjamin, Councilor Dennis Carlone (Chair).
• Preventing Nuclear Weapons Use
  • Lisbeth Gronlund, Dr. Kea van der Ziel, Prof. Elaine Scarry, Shelagh Foreman, Jerold Ross (Chair).

Sunday Morning Planning Breakfast

Student-led session to design and implement programs enhancing existing campus groups, and organizing new ones; extending the network to campuses in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.

For more information, contact Jonathan King at <jaking@mit.edu>, or call 617-354-2169

Click here to see this page in other languages: Russian

London, UK – On October 27, 1962, a soft-spoken naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov single-handedly prevented nuclear war during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Arkhipov’s submarine captain, thinking their sub was under attack by American forces, wanted to launch a nuclear weapon at the ships above. Arkhipov, with the power of veto, said no, thus averting nuclear war.

Now, 55 years after his courageous actions, the Future of Life Institute has presented the Arkhipov family with the inaugural Future of Life Award to honor humanity’s late hero.

Arkhipov’s surviving family members, represented by his daughter Elena and grandson Sergei, flew into London for the ceremony, which was held at the Institute of Engineering & Technology. After explaining Arkhipov’s heroics to the audience, Max Tegmark, president of FLI, presented the Arkhipov family with their award and $50,000. Elena and Sergei were both honored by the gesture and by the overall message of the award.

Elena explained that her father “always thought that he did what he had to do and never consider his actions as heroism. … Our family is grateful for the prize and considers it as a recognition of his work and heroism. He did his part for the future so that everyone can live on our planet.”

The Future of Life Award seeks to recognize and reward those who take exceptional measures to safeguard the collective future of humanity. Arkhipov, whose courage and composure potentially saved billions of lives, was an obvious choice for the inaugural event.

“Vasili Arkhipov is arguably the most important person in modern history, thanks to whom October 27 2017 isn’t the 55th anniversary of World War III,” FLI president Max Tegmark explained. “We’re showing our gratitude in a way he’d have appreciated, by supporting his loved ones.”

The award also aims to foster a dialogue about the growing existential risks that humanity faces, and the people that work to mitigate them.

Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of FLI, said: “Given that this century will likely bring technologies that can be even more dangerous than nukes, we will badly need more people like Arkhipov — people who will represent humanity’s interests even in the heated moments of a crisis.”

Spring Conference at MIT, Saturday, May 6

The growing hostility between the US and Russia — and with North Korea and Iran — makes it more urgent than ever to reduce the risk of nuclear war, as well as to rethink plans to spend a trillion dollars replacing US nuclear weapons with new ones that will be more suited for launching a first-strike. Nuclear war can be triggered intentionally or through miscalculation — terror or error — and this conference aims to advocate and organize toward reducing and ultimately eliminating this danger.

This one-day event includes lunch as well as food for thought from a great speaker lineup, including Iran-deal broker Ernie Moniz (MIT, fmr Secretary of Energy), California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Lisbeth Gronlund (Union of Concerned Scientists), Joe Cirincione (Ploughshares), our former congressman John Tierney, MA state reps Denise Provost and Mike Connolly, and Cambridge Mayor Denise Simmons. It is not an academic conference, but rather one that addresses the political and economic realities, and attempts to stimulate and inform the kinds of social movement needed to change national policy. The focus will be on concrete steps we can take to reduce the risks.

Schedule

8:45 AM – Registration and coffee

9:15 AM – Welcome from City of Cambridge: Mayor Denise Simmons

9:30 AM – Program for the Day: Prof. Jonathan King (MIT, Peace Action)

9:45 AM – Session I. The Pressing Need for Nuclear Disarmament

– Costs and Profits from Nuclear Weapons Manufacture: William Hartung (Center for International Policy).

– Reasons to Reject the Trillion Dollar Nuclear Weapons Escalation: Joseph Cirincione (Ploughshares Fund).

– Nuclear Weapons Undermine Democracy: Prof. Elaine Scarry (Harvard University)

10:45 AM – Session II. Destabilizing Factors

Chair: Prof. Frank Von Hippel (Princeton University)

– Dangers of Hair Trigger Alert: Lisbeth Gronlund (Union of Concerned Scientists).

– Nuclear Modernization vs. National Security: Prof. Aron Bernstein (MIT, Council for a Livable World).

– Accidents and Unexpected Events: Prof. Max Tegmark (MIT, Future of Life Institute).

– International Tensions and Risks of further Nuclear Proliferation: TBA.

12:00 PM – Lunch Workshops (listed below)

2:00 PM – Session III. Economic and Social Consequences of Excessive Weapons Spending

Chair: Prof. Melissa Nobles (MIT):

– Build Housing Not Bombs: Rev. Paul Robeson Ford (Union Baptist Church).

– Education as a National Priority: Barbara Madeloni (Mass Teachers Association).

– Invest in Minds Not Missiles: Prof. Jonathan King (MIT, Mass Peace Action).

– Build Subways Not Submarines: Fred Salvucci (former Secretary of Transportation).

3:00 PM – Session IV. Current Prospects for Progress

Chair: John Tierney (former US Representative, Council for a Livable World)

– House Steps Toward Nuclear Disarmament: U. S. Representative Barbara Lee.

– Maintaining the Iran Nuclear Agreement: Ernie Moniz (MIT, former Secretary of Energy).

4:15 PM – Session V. Organizing to Reduce the Dangers

Chair: Jim Anderson (President, Peace Action New York State):

– Divesting from Nuclear Weapons Investments: Susi Snyder (Don’t Bank on the Bomb).

– Taxpayers Information and Transparency Acts: State Reps Denise Provost/Mike Connolly.

– Mobilizing the Scientific Community: Prof. Max Tegmark (MIT, Future of Life Institute).

– A National Nuclear Disarmament Organizing Network 2017 -2018: Program Committee.

5:00 PM – Adjourn

Conference Workshops:

a) Campus Organizing – Chair: Kate Alexander (Peace Action New York State); Caitlin Forbes (Mass Peace Action); Remy Pontes (Brandeis University); Haleigh Copley-Cunningham (Tufts U), Lucas Perry (Don’t Bank on the Bomb, Future of Life Institute); MIT Students (Nuclear Weapons Matter).

b) Bringing nuclear weapons into physics and history course curricula – Chair: Frank Davis (past President of TERC); Prof. Gary Goldstein (Tufts University); Prof. Aron Bernstein (MIT); Prof. Vincent Intondi (American University); Ray Matsumiya (Oleander Initiative, University of the Middle East Project).

c) Dangerous Conflicts – Chair, Erica Fein (Women’s Action for New Directions); Jim Walsh (MT Security Studies Program); John Tierney (former US Representative, Council for a Livable World); Subrata Ghoshroy (MIT); Arnie Alpert (New Hampshire AFSC).

d) Municipal and State Initiatives – Chair: Cole Harrison (Mass Peace Action); Rep. Denise Provost (Mass State Legislature); Councilor Dennis Carlone (Cambridge City Councillor and Architect/Urban Designer); Jared Hicks (Our Revolution); Prof. Ceasar McDowell (MIT Urban Studies); Nora Ranney (National Priorities Project).

e) Peace with Justice: People’s Budget and Related Campaigns to Shift Federal budget Priorities – Chair: Andrea Miller (People Demanding Action); Rep. Mike Connolly (Mass State Legislature); Paul Shannon (AFSC); Madelyn Hoffman (NJPA); Richard Krushnic (Mass Peoples Budget Campaign).

f) Reducing Nuclear Weapons through Treaties and Negotiation – Chair: Prof. Nazli Choucri (MIT), Kevin Martin (National Peace Action); Shelagh Foreman (Mass Peace Action); Joseph Gerson (AFSC); Michel DeGraff (MIT Haiti Project).

g) Strengthening the Connection between Averting Climate Change and Averting Nuclear War – Chair: Prof. Frank Von Hippel (Princeton University); Ed Aquilar (Pennsylvania Peace Action); Geoffrey Supran (Fossil Free MIT); Rosalie Anders (Mass Peace Action).

h) Working with Communities of Faith – Chair: Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas (MIT Radius); Rev. Herb Taylor (Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church); Pat Ferrone (Mass Pax Christi); Rev. Paul Robeson Ford (Union Baptist Church).

Address

50 Vassar St. Building #34 Rm 101
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139

Directions

By Red Line: Exit the Kendall Square Red Line Station and walk west (away from Boston) past Ames Street to Vassar Street. Turn left and walk halfway down Vassar to #50 MIT building 34 (broad stairs, set back entrance).

By #1 Bus: Exit in front of MIT Main Entrance. Walk 1/2 block back on Mass Ave to Vassar Street. Turn right and walk half block to #50 MIT Building 34 (broad stairs, set back entrance).

By car: Public Parking Structures are available nearby on Ames Street, between Main and Broadway. A smaller surface lot is on the corner of Mass Ave and Vassar St.

Participants

Kate Alexander – Alexander is a peace advocate and researcher with 10 years experience in community organizing. Her previous work experience includes war crimes research and assistance in a genocide trial in Bosnia and community peace-building work in Northern Uganda. She is a graduate of Brandeis University with a degree in International and Global Studies and a minor in Legal Studies. Kate is currently studying at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Arnie Alpert – Alpert serves as AFSC’s New Hampshire co-director and co-coordinator of the Presidential Campaign Project, and has coordinated AFSC’s New Hampshire program since 1981. He is a leader in movements for economic justice and affordable housing, civil and worker rights, peace and disarmament, abolition of the death penalty, and an end to racism and homophobia.

Rosalie Anders – Anders worked as an Associate Planner with the City of Cambridge’s Community Development Department, and is author of the city’s Pedestrian Plan, a set of guidelines intended to promote walking in the city. She has a Master’s degree in social work and worked as a family therapist for many years. She organizes around peace and environmental issues and is active with 350 Massachusetts. She chairs the Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund board and co-founded our Climate and Peace Working Group in early 2016.

Ed Aquilar – Ed Aguilar is director for the Coalition for Peace Action in the Greater Philadelphia region. After successful collaboration on the New START Treaty (2010), in 2012, he opened the Philadelphia CFPA office, and organized a Voting Rights campaign, to allow 50,000 college students to vote, who were being denied by the “PA Voter ID Law”, later reversed. Ed has worked on rallies and conferences at Friends Center; Temple, Philadelphia, and Drexel Universities; and the Philadelphia Ethical Society—on the climate crisis, drones, mass incarceration, nuclear disarmament, and diplomacy with Iran.

Aron Bernstein – Bernstein is a Professor of Physics Emeritus at MIT where he has been on the faculty since 1961. He has taught a broad range of physics courses from freshman to graduate level. His research program has been in nuclear and particle physics, with an emphasis on studying the basic symmetries of matter, and currently involves collaborations with University and government laboratories, and colleagues in many countries.

Dennis Carlone – Carlone is currently serving his second term on the Cambridge City Council, where he has earned recognition as an advocate for social justice through his expertise in citywide planning, transit policy, and sustainability initiatives.

Nazli Choucri – Nazli Choucri is Professor of Political Science. Her work is in the area of international relations, most notably on sources and consequences of international conflict and violence. Professor Choucri is the architect and Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), a multi-lingual web-based knowledge networking system focusing on the multi-dimensionality of sustainability. As Principal Investigator of an MIT-Harvard multi-year project on Explorations in Cyber International Relations, she directed a multi-disciplinary and multi-method research initiative. She is Editor of the MIT Press Series on Global Environmental Accord and, formerly, General Editor of the International Political Science Review. She also previously served as the Associate Director of MIT’s Technology and Development Program.

Joseph Cirincione – Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. He is the author of the new book Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats. He is a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s International Security Advisory Board and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mike Connolly – Connolly is an attorney and community organizer who proudly represents Cambridge and Somerville in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He is committed to social and economic justice and emphasizes the importance of broad investments in affordable housing, public transportation, early education, afterschool programs, and other critical services.

Haleigh Copley-Cunningham

Frank Davis

Michel DeGraff – DeGraff is the Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, a Founding Member of Akademi Kreyol Ayisyen, and a Professor of Linguistics at MIT. His research interests include syntax, morphology, and language change and is the author of over 40 publications.

Erica Fein – Fein is WAND’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Director. In this capacity, she works with Congress, the executive branch, and the peace and security community on arms control, nonproliferation, and Pentagon and nuclear weapons budget reduction efforts. Previously, Erica served as a legislative assistant to Congressman John D. Dingell where she advised on national security, defense, foreign policy, small business, and veterans’ issues. Erica’s commentary has been published in the New York Times, Defense One, Defense News, The Hill, and the Huffington Post. She has also appeared on WMNF 88.5 in Tampa. Erica holds a M.A in International Security from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a B.A. in International Studies from University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is a political partner at the Truman National Security Project. Erica can be found on Twitter @enfein.

Charles Ferguson – Ferguson has been the president of the Federation of American Scientists since January 1, 2010. From February 1998 to August 2000, Dr. Ferguson worked for FAS on nuclear proliferation and arms control issues as a senior research analyst. Previously, from 2002 to 2004, Dr. Ferguson had been with the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) as its scientist-in-residence. At CNS, he co-authored the book The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism and was also lead author of the award-winning report “Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks,” which was published in January 2003 and was one of the first post-9/11 reports to assess the radiological dispersal device, or “dirty bomb,” threat. This report won the 2003 Robert S. Landauer Lecture Award from the Health Physics Society. From June 2011 to October 2013, he served as Co-Chairman of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group, organized by the Mansfield Foundation, FAS, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. In May 2011, his book Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know was published by Oxford University Press. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for his work in educating the public and policy makers about nuclear issues. Dr. Ferguson received his undergraduate degree in physics from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Pat Ferrone – Pat has been involved in peace and justice issues from a gospel nonviolent perspective for the past 40+ years. Currently, she acts as Co-coordinator of Pax Christi MA, a regional group of Pax Christi USA, the Catholic peace organization associated with Pax Christi International. Pax Christi, “grounded in the gospel and Catholic social teaching…rejects war, preparation for war, every form of violence and domination, and personal and systemic racism..we seek to model the Peace of Christi in our witness to the mandate of the nonviolence of the Cross.” She also chairs the St. Susanna Parish Pax Christi Committee, which recently sponsored two programs on the nuclear issue.

Caitlin Forbes – Forbes is the Student Outreach Coordinator for Massachusetts Peace Action, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to develop peaceful US policies. Before beginning her work with MAPA, Caitlin gained a strong background with students through her work as an instructor of first year literature at the University of Connecticut and as the assistant alpine ski coach for Brown University. Caitlin has received both her B.A. and her M.A. in Literature and focused her work on the intersection between US-Middle Eastern foreign policy and contemporary American literature.

Rev. Paul Robeson Ford – The Rev. Paul Robeson Ford is the Senior Pastor of the Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shortly after his third year at Union, he assumed leadership as Executive Director of the Boston Workers Alliance, a Roxbury-based grassroots organization dedicated to creating economic opportunity and winning criminal justice reform in Massachusetts; he served there until June 2016.
He received a Bachelor of Arts from Grinnell College and a Master of Divinity Degree from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

Shelagh Foreman – Shelagh is the program director of Massachusetts Peace Action. She was a founding member in the early 1980s of Mass Freeze, the statewide nuclear freeze organization, which merged with SANE to form Massachusetts Peace Action. She has worked consistently on nuclear disarmament and on bringing Peace Action’s message to our elected officials. She studied art at The Cooper Union and Columbia University, taught art and art history, and is a painter and printmaker. She represents MAPA on the Political Committee of Mass Alliance and is a core group member of 20/20 Action. She serves on the boards of Mass. Peace Action and Mass. Peace Action Ed Fund and on MAPA’s executive committee and is chair of MAPA’s Middle East Task Force. She has 5 children and 7 grandchildren and with her husband Ed Furshpan lives in Cambridge and also spends time in Falmouth.

Joseph Gerson – Gerson has served the American Friends Service committee since 1976 and is currently Director of Programs and Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program for the AFSC in New England. His program work focuses on challenging and overcoming U.S. global hegemony, its preparations for and threats to initiate nuclear war, and its military domination of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

Subrata Ghoshroy – Ghoshroy is a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Before that, he was for many years a senior engineer in the field of high-energy lasers. He was also a professional staff member of the House National Security Committee and later a senior analyst with the Government Accountability Office.

Prof. Gary R. Goldstein is a theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy particle physics and nuclear physics. As a researcher, teacher and a long time member of Tufts Physics and Astronomy Department, he taught all levels of Physics course along with courses for non-scientists including Physics for Humanists, The Nuclear Age: History and Physics (with Prof. M. Sherwin – History), Physics of Music and Color. He is a political activist on nuclear issues, social equity, anti-war, and environmentalism. He spent several years working in the Program for Science, Technology and International Security and at University of Oxford Department of Theoretical Physics. He was also a Science Education researcher affiliated with the Tufts Education department and TERC, Cambridge, working with K-12 students and teachers in public schools. He is a member of the board of the Mass Peace Action fund for education. Over many years he has been giving talks for a general audience about the dangers of nuclear weapons and war.

Lisbeth Gronlund – Gronlund focuses on technical and policy issues related to nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defenses, and space weapons. She has authored numerous articles and reports, lectured on nuclear arms control and missile defense policy issues before lay and expert audiences, and testified before Congress. A long list of news organizations, including the New York Times and NPR, have cited Gronlund since she joined UCS in 1992.

Cole Harrison – Cole is Executive Director of Massachusetts Peace Action. He was on the coordinating committee of the 2012 Budget for All Massachusetts campaign, co-coordinates the People’s Budget Campaign, and leads Peace Action’s national Move the Money Working Group. He is a member of the planning committee of United for Justice with Peace (UJP) and coordinated the Afghanistan Working Group of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) from 2010 to 2012. Born in Delhi, India, he has a B.A. from Harvard in applied mathematics and a M.S. from Northeastern in computer science. He worked for the Symphony Tenants Organizing Project and the Fenway News in the 1970?s, participated in the Jamaica Plain Committee on Central America (JP COCA) in the 1980s, and worked as a software developer and manager at CompuServe Data Technologies, Praxis Inc., and Ask.com before joining Peace Action in 2010. He lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts.

William Hartung – He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). His previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations. From July 2007 through March 2011, Mr. Hartung was the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Prior to that, he served as the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute.

Madelyn Hoffman

Jared Hicks

Prof. Vincent Intondi

Thea Keith-Lucas – Keith-Lucas was raised on the campus of the University of the South in a family of scientists and engineers. She served as Curate to Trinity Church in Randolph, one of the most ethnically diverse parishes of the Diocese of Massachusetts, and then in 2007 was called as Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Danvers, where she initiated creative outreach efforts and facilitated a merger. Thea joined the staff of Radius in January 2013.

Jonathan A. King – King is professor of molecular biology at MIT, the author of over 250 scientific papers, and a specialist in protein folding. Prof. King is a former President of the Biophysical Society, former Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of MIT’s MLKJr Faculty Leadership Award. He was a leader in the mobilization of biomedical scientists to renounce the military use of biotechnology and strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. He was a founder of a Jobs with Peace campaign in the 1980s and now chairs Massachusetts Peace Action’s Nuclear Weapons Abolition working group. He is also an officer of the Cambridge Residents Alliance and of Citizens for Public Schools.

Richard Krushnic

Barbara Lee – Lee is the U.S. Representative for California’s 13th congressional district, serving East Bay voters from 1998 to 2013 during a time when the region was designated California’s 9th congressional district. She is a member of the Democratic Party. She was the first woman to represent the 9th district and is also the first woman to represent the 13th district. Lee was the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and was the Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Lee is notable as the only member of either house of Congress to vote against the authorization of use of force following the September 11, 2001 attacks.[1] This made her a hero among many in the anti-war movement.[2] Lee has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and supports legislation creating a Department of Peace.

Kevin Martin – Martin, President of Peace Action and the Peace Action Education Fund, joined the staff on Sept 4, 2001. Kevin previously served as Director of Project Abolition, a national organizing effort for nuclear disarmament, from August 1999 through August 2001. Kevin came to Project Abolition after ten years in Chicago as Executive Director of Illinois Peace Action. Prior to his decade-long stint in Chicago, Kevin directed the community outreach canvass for Peace Action (then called Sane/Freeze) in Washington, D.C., where he originally started as a door-to-door canvasser with the organization in 1985. Kevin has traveled abroad representing Peace Action and the U.S. peace movement on delegations and at conferences in Russia, Japan, China, Mexico and Britain. He is married, with two children, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Barbara Madeloni – Madeloni is president of the 110,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association and a staunch advocate for students and educators in the public schools and public higher education system in Massachusetts. She believes that strong unions led by rank-and-file members produce stronger public schools and communities. She is committed to racial and economic justice – and to building alliances with parents, students and communities – to secure a more just world.

Ray Matsumiya

Ceasar McDowell – McDowell is Professor of the Practice of Community Development at MIT. He holds an Ed.D. (88) and M.Ed. (84) from Harvard. McDowell’’s current work is on the development of community knowledge systems and civic engagement. He is also expanding his critical moments reflection methodology to identify, share and maintaining grassroots knowledge. His research and teaching interests also include the use of mass media and technology in promoting democracy and community-building, the education of urban students, the development and use of empathy in community work, civil rights history, peacemaking and conflict resolution. He is Director of the global civic engagement organization dropping knowledge international Dropping Knowledge International, MIT’s former Center for Reflective Community Practice (renamed Co-Lab) and co-founder of The Civil Rights Forum on Telecommunications Policy and founding Board member of The Algebra Project Algebra.

Andrea Miller

Ernie Moniz – Moniz is an American nuclear physicist and the former United States Secretary of Energy, serving under U.S. President Barack Obama from May 2013 to January 2017. He served as the Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and was Under Secretary of Energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton Administration. Moniz is one of the founding members of The Cyprus Institute and has served at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, as the Director of the Energy Initiative, and as the Director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.

Melissa Nobles – Nobles is Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her current research is focused on constructing a database of racial murders in the American South, 1930–1954. Working closely as a faculty collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, Nobles has conducted extensive archival research, unearthing understudied and more often, unknown racial murders and contributing to several legal investigations. She is the author of two books, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000), The Politics of Official Apologies, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and co-editor with Jun-Hyeok Kwak of Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asia (Routledge Press, 2013).

Remy Pontes

Lucas Perry – Perry is passionate about the role that science and technology will play in the evolution of all sentient life. He has studied at a Buddhist monastery in Nepal and while there he engaged in meditative retreats and practices. He is now working to challenge and erode our sense of self and our subject-object frame of reference. His current project explores how mereological nihilism and the illusion of self may contribute to forming a radically post-human consequentialist ethics. His other work seeks to resolve the conflicts between bio-conservatism and transhumanism.

Denise Provost

John Ratliff – Ratliff was political director of an SEIU local union in Miami, Florida, and relocated to Cambridge after his retirement in 2012. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. A Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans for Peace, he is a member of the coordinating committee of Massachusetts Senior Action’s Cambridge branch, and chair of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice’s Global Justice Task Force. As Mass. Peace Action’s economic justice coordinator he leads our coalition work with Raise Up Massachusetts for an increased minimum wage and sick time benefits, and against the Trans Pacific Partnership. He is the father of high school senior Daniel Bausher-Belton, who was an intern at Mass. Peace Action in summer 2013.

Fred Salvucci – Salvucci, senior lecturer and senior research associate, is a civil engineer with interest in infrastructure, urban transportation and public transportation. He has over 30 years of contextual transportation experience, most of it in the public sector as former Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1983-1990) and transportation advisor to Boston Mayor Kevin White (1975-1978). Some of his notable achievements include shifting public focus from highway spending towards rail transit investment and spearheading the depression of the Central Artery in Boston. He has participated in the expansion of the transit system, the development of the financial and political support for the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, and the design of implementation strategies to comply with the Clean Air Act consistent with economic growth. Other efforts include formulation of noise rules to reverse the increase in aircraft noise at Logan Airport and development of strategies to achieve high-speed rail service between Boston and New York.

Elaine Scarry – Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her books include The Body in Pain, Thermonuclear Monarchy, and On Beauty and Being Just.

Paul Shannon – Shannon is program staff for the Peace and Economic Security program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Cambridge, hosts regular educational forums at the Cambridge Public Library for the AFSC and has coordinated the National AFSC Film Lending Library for the past 26 years. For over 3 decades he has been active in various peace, union, prison reform, solidarity, economic justice and human rights movements particularly the Vietnam anti-war movement, the 1970’s United Farm Workers movement, the South Africa anti-apartheid movement, the 1980’s Central America and Cambodia solidarity movements, the Haiti Solidarity movement of the early 90’s and the Afghanistan and Iraq anti-war movement. Paul has been teaching social science courses at colleges in the greater Boston area for the past 27 years. Since 1982 he has been teaching a course on the history of the Vietnam War at Middlesex Community College and occasionally teaches professional development courses on the Vietnam war for high school teachers at Northeastern University and Merrimack Educational Center. He is past editor of the Indochina Newsletter and has written numerous articles for peace movement publications. He is on the Board of Directors of the community/fan organization, Save Fenway Park. He currently represents the American Friends Service Committee on the Coordinating Committee of the United for Justice with Peace Coalition.

Denise Simmons – As Mayor of the City of Cambridge, Denise Simmons won praise for her open-door policy, for her excellent constituent services, and for her down-to-earth approach to her duties. She continues to bring these qualities to her work on the Cambridge City Council. She was sworn in to her second term as mayor on January 4, 2016.

Susie Snyder – Mrs. Susi Snyder is the Nuclear Disarmament Programme Manager for Pax in the Netherlands. Mrs. Snyder is a primary author of the Don’t Bank on the Bomb: Global Report on the Financing of Nuclear Weapons Producers (2013, 2014, 2015) and has published numerous reports and articles, including the 2015 Dealing with a Ban & Escalating Tensions, the 2014 The Rotterdam Blast: The immediate humanitarian consequences of a 12 kiloton nuclear explosion; and the 2011 Withdrawal Issues: What NATO countries say about the future of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. She is an International Steering Group member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Previously, Mrs. Snyder served as the International Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she monitored various issues under the aegis of the United Nations, including sustainable development, human rights, and disarmament.

Geoffrey Supran – Longstanding interest in optoelectronics. Opportunities to overcome scientific and economic hurdles in solar cell design and significantly impact world energy markets are alluring. Hybrid devices combining the flexibility, large area and tunable absorption of low cost solution processable nanocrystals (or polymers) with the high carrier mobility of, for example, III-V semiconductors, appear promising. In particular, enhancement of photocurrent by nonradiative energy transfer and carrier multiplication is of interest. Additionally, the importance of a nanoscale test-bed for fundamental studies of photo-induced energy/charge transport motivates my curiosity for the investigation of stand-alone photovoltaic single nanowire heterostructures. I am also interested in the development of photoelectrochemical storage catalysts and the pursuit of coupled photovoltaic-electrolysis systems.

Herb Taylor – Taylor became Senior Pastor at Harvard-Epworth UMC in August, 2014. Before coming to the church, he served as President and CEO of Deaconess Abundant Life Communities, a not-for-profit aging services provider. Founded in 1889, the Deaconess has over 400 employees and serves over a thousand older adults through skilled nursing, assisted living and independent living apartments in multiple locations in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Max Tegmark – Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, his scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book “Our Mathematical Universe”. He is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” He is founder (with Anthony Aguirre) of the Foundational Questions Institute.

John Tierney – Tierney is an American politician who served as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts from January 3, 1997, to January 3, 2015. In February 2016, he was appointed the executive director of the Council for a Livable World and the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the council’s affiliated education and research organization. He is a Democrat who represented the state’s 6th district, which includes the state’s North Shore and Cape Ann. Born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, Tierney graduated from Salem State College and Suffolk University Law School. He worked in private law and served on the Salem Chamber of Commerce (1976–97). Tierney was sworn in as a U.S. representative in 1997.

Frank Von Hippel – Hippel’s areas of policy research include nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, energy, and checks and balances in policy making for technology. Prior to coming to Princeton, he worked for ten years in the field of elementary-particle theoretical physics. He has written extensively on the technical basis for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament initiatives, the future of nuclear energy, and improved automobile fuel economy. He won a 1993 MacArthur fellowship in recognition of his outstanding contributions to his fields of research. During 1993–1994, he served as assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Jim Walsh – Walsh is a Senior Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP).Walsh’s research and writings focus on international security, and in particular, topics involving nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and East Asia. Walsh has testified before the United States Senate and House of Representatives on issues of nuclear terrorism, Iran, and North Korea. He is one of a handful of Americans who has traveled to both Iran and North Korea for talks with officials about nuclear issues. His recent publications include “Stopping North Korea, Inc.: Sanctions Effectiveness and Unintended Consequences” and “Rivals, Adversaries, and Partners: Iran and Iraq in the Middle East” in Iran and Its Neighbors. He is the international security contributor to the NPR program “Here and Now,” and his comments and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and numerous other national and international media outlets. Before coming to MIT, Dr. Walsh was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has taught at both Harvard University and MIT. Dr. Walsh received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Organizers

We would like to extend a special thank you to our Program Committee and sponsors for all their help creating and organizing this event.

Prof. Aron Bernstein (MIT, Council for a Livable), Joseph Gerson (AFSC), Subrata Ghoshroy (MIT), Prof. Gary Goldstein (Tufts University), Cole Harrison (Mass Peace Action), Jonathan King (MIT and Mass Peace Action), State Rep. Denise Provost; John Ratliff (Mass Peace Action, Mass Senior Action), Prof. Elaine Scarry (Harvard University), Prof.Max Tegmark (MIT, Future of Life Institute), Patricia Weinmann (MIT Radius).

Sponsored by MIT Radius (the former Technology and Culture Forum), Massachusetts Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Future of Life Institute.

Conference Schedule

Thursday January 5

All afternoon: registration open; come chill & meet old and new friends!
1800-2100: Welcome reception

Friday January 6

0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Opening keynotes on AI, economics & law: Progress since Puerto Rico 2015

• Welcome Remarks by Max Tegmark (video)
• Talks:
  • Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT) (pdf) (video)
  • Yoshua Bengio (Montreal) (pdf) (video)
  • Viktoriya Krakovna (DeepMind/FLI) (pdf) (video)
  • Stuart Russell (Berkeley) (pdf) (video)
  • Ryan Calo (U. Washington) (video)
• Group photo

1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1500: Breakout sessions
1500-1800: Economics: How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose?

• Talk: Daniela Rus (MIT) (video)
• Panel with Daniela Rus (MIT), Andrew Ng (Baidu), Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind), Moshe Vardi (Rice) & Peter Norvig (Google): How AI is automating and augmenting work (video)
• Talks:
  • Andrew McAfee (MIT) (pdf) (video)
  • Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia) (pdf) (video)
• Panel with Andrew McAfee (MIT), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia), Eric Schmidt (Google) & Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn): Implications of AI for the Economy and Society (video)
• Fireside chat with Daniel Kahneman: What makes people happy? (video)

1800-2100: Dinner

Saturday January 7

0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Creating human-level AI: Will it happen, and if so, when and how? What key remaining obstacles can be identified? How can we make future AI systems more robust than today’s, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked?

• Talks:
  • Demis Hassabis (DeepMind) (video)
  • Ray Kurzweil (Google) (video)
  • Yann LeCun (Facebook/NYU) (pdf) (video)
• Panel with Anca Dragan (Berkeley), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Guru Banavar (IBM), Oren Etzioni (Allen Institute), Tom Gruber (Apple), Jürgen Schmidhuber (Swiss AI Lab), Yann LeCun (Facebook/NYU), Yoshua Bengio (Montreal) (video)

1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1500: Breakout sessions
1500-1800: Superintelligence: Science or fiction? If human level general AI is developed, then what are likely outcomes? What can we do now to maximize the probability of a positive outcome? (video)

• Talks:
  • Shane Legg (DeepMind)
  • Nick Bostrom (Oxford) (pdf) (video)
  • Jaan Tallinn (CSER/FLI) (pdf) (video)
• Panel with Bart Selman (Cornell), David Chalmers (NYU), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Jaan Tallinn (CSER/FLI), Nick Bostrom (FHI), Ray Kurzweil (Google), Stuart Russell (Berkeley), Sam Harris, Demis Hassabis (DeepMind): If we succeed in building human-level AGI, then what are likely outcomes? What would we like to happen? (video)
• Panel with Dario Amodei (OpenAI), Nate Soares (MIRI), Shane Legg (DeepMind), Richard Mallah (FLI), Stefano Ermon (Stanford), Viktoriya Krakovna (DeepMind/FLI): Technical research agenda: What can we do now to maximize the chances of a good outcome? (video)

1800-2200: Banquet

Sunday January 8

0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Law, policy & ethics: How can we update legal systems, international treaties and algorithms to be more fair, ethical and efficient and to keep pace with AI?

• Talks:
  • Matt Scherer (pdf) (video)
  • Heather Roff-Perkins (Oxford)
• Panel with Martin Rees (CSER/Cambridge), Heather Roff-Perkins, Jason Matheny (IARPA), Steve Goose (HRW), Irakli Beridze (UNICRI), Rao Kambhampati (AAAI, ASU), Anthony Romero (ACLU): Policy & Governance (video)
  
• Panel with Kate Crawford (Microsoft/MIT), Matt Scherer, Ryan Calo (U. Washington), Kent Walker (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI): AI & Law (video)
• Panel with Kay Firth-Butterfield (IEEE, Austin-AI), Wendell Wallach (Yale), Francesca Rossi (IBM/Padova), Huw Price (Cambridge, CFI), Margaret Boden (Sussex): AI & Ethics (video)

1200-1300: Lunch
1300: Depart

Read the 23 Asilomar AI Principles

Workshop Schedule

Tuesday January 3

All afternoon: workshop registration open; come chill & meet old and new friends!
1800-2100: Welcome reception, breakout session sign-up

Wednesday January 4

0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Talks & discussions

• Grant-winner talks on value learning: Stuart Russell (Berkeley) (pdf), Francesca Rossi (IBM/Padova) (pdf), Owain Evans (FHI) (pdf), Adrian Weller (Cambridge), Vincent Conitzer (Duke) (pdf)
• Panel with above speakers: Future directions in value learning
• Panel with Tom Dietterich, Manuela Veloso, Bart Selman & Jürgen Schmidhuber: Will we ever build human-level AI?

1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1400: Lightning talks: Dario Amodei (OpenAI) (pdf), Catherine Olsson (OpenAI) (pdf), Andrew Critch (CHCAI/MIRI) (link), Eric
Drexler (MIT), Allan Dafoe (Yale), Jürgen Schmidhuber (Swiss AI Lab) (pdf), Toby Walsh (UNSW) (pdf)
1400-1500: Breakout session A
1500-1800: Talks & discussions

• Grant-winner talks on verification, safe self-modification, and complexity: Bart Selman (Cornell) (pdf), Stefano Ermon (Stanford) (pdf), Katja Grace (MIRI), Andrew Critch (CHCAI/MIRI) (pdf), Ramana Kumar (Data61/CSIRO/UNSW) (pdf) & Bas Steunebrink (IDSIA) (pdf)
• Panel with above speakers: Future directions in these areas
• Panel with above speakers and Toby Walsh: Recursive self-improvement: fast takeoff, slow takeoff or no takeoff?

1800-2100: Dinner

Thursday January 5

0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Talks & discussions

• Grant-winner talks on control, uncertainty identification & management: Thomas Dietterich (OSU) (pdf), Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon) (pdf), Percy Liang (Stanford) (pdf), Long Ouyang (pdf), Paul Christiano (OpenAI) (pdf), Fuxin Li (OSU) (pdf) & Brian Ziebart (U. Chicago) (pdf)
• Panel with above speakers: Future directions in these areas
• “Red-team” Panel with Dario Amodei (OpenAI), Eric Drexler (MIT), Jan Leike (FHI/DeepMind), Percy Liang (Stanford) & Eliezer Yudkowsky (MIRI): What could go wrong with AGI and how can these problems be avoided?

1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1400: Breakout session B
1400-1500: Breakout session C
1500-1800: Talks & discussions

• Grant-winner talks on governance & ethics: Nick Bostrom (Oxford), Wendell Wallach (Yale) (pdf), Heather Roff Perkins (Oxford/ASU) (pdf), Peter Asaro (New School) (pdf) & Moshe Vardi (Rice) (pdf)
• Grant-winner talks on education: Anna Salamon (CFAR) & Paul Christiano (OpenAI) (pdf)
• Panel with Anna Salamon (CFAR) & Paul Christiano (OpenAI): Educating and mentoring AI safety researchers (Moderator: Andrew Critch)
• Grant-winner talk: Owen Cotton-Barratt (GPP) (pdf)
• Panel with Allan Dafoe (Yale), Anthony Aguirre (FLI) & Owen Cotton-Barratt (GPP): Prediction (Moderator: Jaan Tallinn (FLI/CSER))

1800-2100: Welcome reception for Beneficial AI 2017 conference

Scientific Organizing Committee

Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-author of The Second Machine Age
Eric Horvitz, Microsoft, co-chair of the AAAI presidential panel on long-term AI futures
Peter Norvig, Google, Director of Research, co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach
Francesca Rossi, Univ. Padova, Professor of Computer Science, IBM,  President of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach
Bart Selman, Cornell University, Professor of Computer Science, co-chair of the AAAI presidential panel on long-term AI futures
Max Tegmark, MIT, Professor of Physics

Local Organizers

Anthony Aguirre, Meia Chita-Tegmark, Ariel Conn, Tucker Davey, Lucas Perry, Viktoriya Krakovna, Janos Kramar, Richard Mallah, Max Tegmark.

Sponsors

A special thank you to our generous sponsors: Alexander Tamas; The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines; Elon Musk; Jaan Tallinn; and The Open Philanthropy Project.

Bios for the attendees and participants can be found here.

Standing Row: Patrick Lin, Daniel Weld, Ariel Conn, Nancy Chang, Tom Mitchell, Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Dewey, Margaret Boden, Peter Norvig, Nick Hay, Moshe Vardi, Scott Siskind, Nick Bostrom, Francesca Rossi, Shane Legg, Manuela Veloso, David Marble, Katja Grace, Irakli Beridze, Marty Tenenbaum, Gill Pratt, Martin Rees, Joshua Greene, Matt Scherer, Angela Kane, Amara Angelica, Jeff Mohr, Mustafa Suleyman, Steve Omohundro, Kate Crawford, Vitalik Buterin, Yutaka Matsuo, Stefano Ermon, Michael Wellman, Bas Steunebrink, Wendell Wallach, Allan Dafoe, Toby Ord, Thomas Dietterich, Daniel Kahneman, Dario Amodei, Eric Drexler, Tomaso Poggio, Eric Schmidt, Pedro Ortega, David Leake, Sean O’Heigeartaigh, Owain Evans, Jaan Tallinn, Anca Dragan, Sean Legassick, Toby Walsh, Peter Asaro, Kay Firth-Butterfield, Philip Sabes, Paul Merolla, Bart Selman, Tucker Davey, ?, Jacob Steinhardt, Moshe Looks, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Gruber, Andrew Ng, Kareem Ayoub, Craig Calhoun, Percy Liang, Helen Toner, David Chalmers, Richard Sutton, Claudia Passos-Ferriera, Janos Kramar, William MacAskill, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Brian Ziebart, Huw Price, Carl Shulman, Neil Lawrence, Richard Mallah, Jurgen Schmidhuber, Dileep George, Jonathan Rothberg, Noah Rothberg

Sitting Row: Anthony Aguirre, Sonia Sachs, Lucas Perry, Jeffrey Sachs, Vincent Conitzer, Steve Goose, Victoria Krakovna, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Daniela Rus, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Verity Harding, Shivon Zilis, Laurent Orseau, Ramana Kumar, Nate Soares, Andrew McAfee, Jack Clark, Anna Salamon, Long Ouyang, Andrew Critch, Paul Christiano, Yoshua Bengio, David Sanford, Catherine Olsson, Jessica Taylor, Martina Kunz, Kristinn Thorisson, Stuart Armstrong, Yann LeCun, Alexander Tamas, Roman Yampolskiy, Marin Soljacic, Lawrence Krauss, Stuart Russell, Eric Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, ShaoLan Hsueh, Meia Chita-Tegmark, Kent Walker, Heather Roff, Meredith Whittaker, Max Tegmark, Adrian Weller, Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Andrew Maynard, John Hering, Abram Demski, Nicolas Berggruen, Gregory Bonnet, Sam Harris, Tim Hwang, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Marta Halina, Sebastian Farquhar, Stephen Cave, Jan Leike, Tasha McCauley, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Not in photo: Guru Banavar, Sam Teller, Anthony Romero, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sam Altman, Oren Etzioni, Chelsea Finn, Ian Goodfellow, Reid Hoffman, Holden Karnofsky, Sergey Levine, Fuxin Li, Jason Matheny, Andrew Serazin, Ilya Sutskever

Read the 23 Asilomar AI Principles

The view from the conference

Even though we have way more nuclear weapons than necessary to deter an enemy attack, we’re planning to spend 4 million dollars every hour for the next 30 years to upgrade our nuclear arsenal, which arguably makes us less safe by increasing the risk of accidental nuclear war. Please join a who’s who of researchers and thought-leaders to get the latest scoop and brainstorm with us about how to put this money to better use. MIT is a perfect place for this thanks to the long legacy of nuclear disarmament work by MIT faculty including Vicki Weisskopf, Philip Morrison, Herman Feshbach, Randall Forsberg, Bernard Feld, Henry Kendall, Kosta Tsipis, Aron Bernstein, Jonathan King and George Rathjens.

Schedule

9:00 AM – Registration

(video – introductory remarks from the following three speakers.)

9:15 AM – Welcome from City of Cambridge: Mayor Denise Simmons

9:25 AM – Welcome from MIT: Vice-President Maria Zuber (MIT)

9:35 AM – (pdf) Program for the Day: Prof. Jonathan King (MIT, Peace Action)

9:45 AM – I. Direct Effects of Nuclear Weapons Deployment and Use

– (video) Consequences of a Megaton Explosion over Boston – Dr. Ira Helfand, (Physicians for Social Responsibility).

– (video, pdf) Climate Consequences of Nuclear War: Prof. Alan Robock, (Environmental Science, Rutgers U).

– (video, pdf) Nuclear Weapons Undermine Democracy: Prof. Elaine Scarry, (Harvard University).

10:45 AM – II. Destabilizing Factors

Chair: Subrata Ghoshroy (MIT)

– (video, pdf) Dangers of Hair Trigger Alert: Lisbeth Gronlund (Union of Concerned Scientists).

– (video, pdf) International Tensions and Risks of further Nuclear Proliferation – Joseph Gerson (AFSC).

– (video, pdf) Nuclear Modernization Reduces Our Security – Prof. Aron Bernstein (MIT, Council for a Livable World).

– (video, pdf) Accidents and Unexpected Events – Prof. Max Tegmark (MIT, Future of Life Institute).

Noon – Pick up lunches and proceed to workshops.

12:30 PM – III. Practical Workshops

a) Intro to Nuclear Weapons – Fission and Fusion Weapons; Cold War Escalation; Proliferation and Non-Proliferation (Rm 34-304; elevator to 3^rd floor) – Chair: Prof. Aron Bernstein (MIT), Dr. Subrata Ghoshroy (MIT), Shelagh Foreman (Mass Peace Action); David Rothauser (Playwright).
b) Engaging students and their teachers in nuclear disarmament initiatives – Chair: Caitlin Forbes (Peace Action); Abel Corver (Harvard Peace Action), Gary Goldstein (Tufts U), Lucas Perry (BC, Future of Life).

c) Strengthening the connection between efforts to avert climate change and efforts to avert nuclear war – Guntram Mueller (Peace Action); Geoffrey Supran (MIT Climate Action); Prof. Alan Robock (Rutgers U), Sue Donaldson (350MA).

d) No to the Trillion Dollar Nuclear Weapons Triad Modernization – Chair: Elaine Scarry (Harvard Univ.); Erica Fein (WAND/WILL); Joe Cirincione (Ploughshares Fund); Cole Harrison (Mass Peace Action).

e) Reducing international tensions through treaties and negotiation – Chair: Prof. Nazli Choucri (MIT), David Wright (UCS), Sonja Amadae (Univ. of Helsinki).

f) People’s budget campaign to cut the nuclear weapons spending – Paul Shannon (AFSC); John Ratliff (Mass Senior Action); Jay Livingstone (Mass State Representative).

g) Building the de-alerting campaign – Mary Popeo (Global Zero); Lisbeth Gronlund (UCS).

1:45 PM Workshops Adjourn

2:00 PM – IV. Mobilizing to Reduce the Dangers

Chair: Cole Harrison (Mass Peace Action):

– (video, pdf) Social and Economic Costs of Nuclear Weapons : Prof. Jonathan King, (MIT and Peace Action).

– (video, pdf) Divesting from Nuclear Weapons Investments: Susi Snyder (Don’t Bank on the Bomb).

– (video) Cambridge Nuclear Weapons Disinvestment Policy: Mayor Denise Simmons.

3:00 PM – V. Current Prospects

Chair: Max Tegmark (MIT and the Future of Life Institute)
– (video) The Necessity of Nuclear Disarmament – William Perry (Former Secretary of Defense).

– (video) Stopping the $Trillion Nuclear Triad Upgrade – Joe Cirincione (Ploughshares Fund).

4:00 PM – VI. Closing Panel

(Video) Moderated by Max Tegmark (MIT): Joe Cirincione (Ploughshares Fund), Charles Ferguson (FAS), Gary Goldstein (Tufts), Mary Pompeo (Global Zero), William Perry, Susi Snyder (Don’t Bank on the Bomb), Max Tegmark (MIT), and Frank Wilczek (MIT)

5:00 PM – Adjourn

Address

50 Vassar St. Building #34 Rm 101

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139

Directions

By Red Line: Exit the Kendall Square Red Line Station and walk west (away from Boston) past Ames Street to Vassar Street. Turn left and walk halfway down Vassar to #50 MIT building 34 (broad stairs, set back entrance).

By #1 Bus: Exit  in front of MIT Main Entrance. Walk 1/2 block back on Mass Ave to Vassar Street. Turn right and walk half block to #50 MIT Building 34 (broad stairs, set back entrance).

By car: Public Parking Structures are available nearby on Ames Street, between Main and Broadway. A smaller surface lot is on the corner of Mass Ave and Vassar St.

Participants

Sonja Amadae – S.M. Amadae studies contemporary normative theory, philosophy of public policy, human rights, philosophy of social science, history of political thought, science, technology and society, international relations and security, and American politics.

Aron Bernstein – Bernstein is a Professor of Physics Emeritus at MIT where he has been on the faculty since 1961. He has taught a broad range of physics courses from freshman to graduate level. His research program has been in nuclear and particle physics, with an emphasis on studying the basic symmetries of matter, and currently involves collaborations with University and government laboratories, and colleagues in many countries.

Nazli Choucri – Nazli Choucri is Professor of Political Science. Her work is in the area of international relations, most notably on sources and consequences of international conflict and violence. Professor Choucri is the architect and Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), a multi-lingual web-based knowledge networking system focusing on the multi-dimensionality of sustainability. As Principal Investigator of an MIT-Harvard multi-year project on Explorations in Cyber International Relations, she directed a multi-disciplinary and multi-method research initiative. She is Editor of the MIT Press Series on Global Environmental Accord and, formerly, General Editor of the International Political Science Review. She also previously served as the Associate Director of MIT’s Technology and Development Program.

Joseph Cirincione – Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. He is the author of the new book Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats. He is a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s International Security Advisory Board and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Abel Corver – Corver is a senior at Harvard College, studying linguistics and neurobiology. He is a member of Massachusetts Peace Action and current president of Harvard College Peace Action (HCPA). HCPA is a student-run group at Harvard currently organizing around nuclear disarmament.

Sue Donaldson – Donaldson, M.D., gave up practicing medicine in 2015 to become a full-time climate activist. Formerly the Medical Director of Outpatient Psychiatry at Hallmark Health in Medford, she has been volunteering with 350MA in a variety of roles since 2013. Her previous experience with nonprofits was in human services and mental health advocacy. She is a graduate of Harvard College and completed her medical training at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Erica Fein – Fein is WAND’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Director. In this capacity, she works with Congress, the executive branch, and the peace and security community on arms control, nonproliferation, and Pentagon and nuclear weapons budget reduction efforts. Previously, Erica served as a legislative assistant to Congressman John D. Dingell where she advised on national security, defense, foreign policy, small business, and veterans’ issues. Erica’s commentary has been published in the New York Times, Defense One, Defense News, The Hill, and the Huffington Post. She has also appeared on WMNF 88.5 in Tampa. Erica holds a M.A in International Security from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a B.A. in International Studies from University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is a political partner at the Truman National Security Project. Erica can be found on Twitter @enfein.

Charles Ferguson – Ferguson has been the president of the Federation of American Scientists since January 1, 2010. From February 1998 to August 2000, Dr. Ferguson worked for FAS on nuclear proliferation and arms control issues as a senior research analyst. Previously, from 2002 to 2004, Dr. Ferguson had been with the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) as its scientist-in-residence. At CNS, he co-authored the book The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism and was also lead author of the award-winning report “Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks,” which was published in January 2003 and was one of the first post-9/11 reports to assess the radiological dispersal device, or “dirty bomb,” threat. This report won the 2003 Robert S. Landauer Lecture Award from the Health Physics Society. From June 2011 to October 2013, he served as Co-Chairman of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group, organized by the Mansfield Foundation, FAS, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. In May 2011, his book Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know was published by Oxford University Press. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for his work in educating the public and policy makers about nuclear issues. Dr. Ferguson received his undergraduate degree in physics from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Caitlin Forbes – Forbes is the Student Outreach Coordinator for Massachusetts Peace Action, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to develop peaceful US policies. Before beginning her work with MAPA, Caitlin gained a strong background with students through her work as an instructor of first year literature at the University of Connecticut and as the assistant alpine ski coach for Brown University. Caitlin has received both her B.A. and her M.A. in Literature and focused her work on the intersection between US-Middle Eastern foreign policy and contemporary American literature.

Joseph Gerson – Gerson has served the American Friends Service committee since 1976 and is currently Director of Programs and Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program for the AFSC in New England. His program work focuses on challenging and overcoming U.S. global hegemony, its preparations for and threats to initiate nuclear war, and its military domination of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

Subrata Ghoshroy – Ghoshroy is a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Before that, he was for many years a senior engineer in the field of high-energy lasers. He was also a professional staff member of the House National Security Committee and later a senior analyst with the Government Accountability Office.

Prof. Gary R. Goldstein is a theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy particle physics  and nuclear physics. As a researcher, teacher and a long time member of Tufts Physics and Astronomy Department, he taught all levels of Physics course along with courses for non-scientists including Physics for Humanists, The Nuclear Age: History and Physics (with Prof. M. Sherwin – History), Physics of Music and Color. He is a political activist on nuclear issues, social equity, anti-war, and environmentalism. He spent several years working in the Program for Science, Technology and International Security and at University of Oxford Department of Theoretical Physics. He was also a Science Education researcher affiliated with the Tufts Education department and TERC, Cambridge, working with K-12 students and teachers in public schools. He is a member of the board of the Mass Peace Action fund for education. Over many years he has been giving talks for a general audience about the dangers of nuclear weapons and war.

Lisbeth Gronlund – Gronlund focuses on technical and policy issues related to nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defenses, and space weapons. She has authored numerous articles and reports, lectured on nuclear arms control and missile defense policy issues before lay and expert audiences, and testified before Congress. A long list of news organizations, including the New York Times and NPR, have cited Gronlund since she joined UCS in 1992.

Cole Harrison – Cole is Executive Director of Massachusetts Peace Action. He was on the coordinating committee of the 2012 Budget for All Massachusetts campaign, co-coordinates the People’s Budget Campaign, and leads Peace Action’s national Move the Money Working Group. He is a member of the planning committee of United for Justice with Peace (UJP) and coordinated the Afghanistan Working Group of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) from 2010 to 2012. Born in Delhi, India, he has a B.A. from Harvard in applied mathematics and a M.S. from Northeastern in computer science. He worked for the Symphony Tenants Organizing Project and the Fenway News in the 1970?s, participated in the Jamaica Plain Committee on Central America (JP COCA) in the 1980s, and worked as a software developer and manager at CompuServe Data Technologies, Praxis Inc., and Ask.com before joining Peace Action in 2010. He lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts.

Dr. Ira Helfand – Helfand has worked for many years as an emergency room physician and now practices internal medicine at an urgent care center in Springfield, MA. He is a Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility and is currently the Co-President of our global federation, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Jonathan A. King – King is professor of molecular biology at MIT, the author of over 250 scientific papers, and a specialist in protein folding. Prof. King is a former President of the Biophysical Society, former Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of MIT’s MLKJr Faculty Leadership Award. He was a leader in the mobilization of biomedical scientists to renounce the military use of biotechnology and strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. He was a founder of a Jobs with Peace campaign in the 1980s and now chairs Massachusetts Peace Action’s Nuclear Weapons Abolition working group. He is also an officer of the Cambridge Residents Alliance and of Citizens for Public Schools.

Guntram Mueller – Mueller is Chair of Massachusetts Peace Action’s Nuclear Abolition Task Force and member of its Board, Guntram Mueller is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He designed a wind turbine and formed a company to market it. Born in Germany, Mueller grew up in Toronto and is now a resident of Newton.

Lucas Perry – Perry is passionate about the role that science and technology will play in the evolution of all sentient life. He has studied at a Buddhist monastery in Nepal and while there he engaged in meditative retreats and practices. He is now working to challenge and erode our sense of self and our subject-object frame of reference. His current project explores how mereological nihilism and the illusion of self may contribute to forming a radically post-human consequentialist ethics. His other work seeks to resolve the conflicts between bio-conservatism and transhumanism.

Secretary William Perry – Bill Perry is an American mathematician, engineer, and businessman who served as the United States Secretary of Defense from February 3, 1994, to January 23, 1997, under President Bill Clinton. He also served as Deputy Secretary of Defense and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Perry also has extensive business experience and currently serves on the boards of several high-tech companies and is Chairman of Global Technology Partners. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Perry’s numerous awards are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1997), Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1998) and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (2002), awarded by the Emperor of Japan.

Mary Popeo – Popeo is a recent graduate of Boston College where she studied international relations and East Asia. She spent three summers in Japan conducting independent research on the effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on Hiroshima’s peace movement and walking 120 miles in an annual peace march. Mary volunteers with peace groups in the Boston area, such as Global Zero and the American Friends Service Committee. She is currently working at the Harvard Kennedy School and as a resident assistant at Showa Boston University of Language and Culture.

Alan Robock – Robock is a Distinguished Professor of climate science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970 with a B.A. in Meteorology, and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an S.M. in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1977, both in Meteorology. Before graduate school, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines. He was a professor at the University of Maryland, 1977-1997, and the State Climatologist of Maryland, 1991-1997, before coming to Rutgers. Prof. Robock has published more than 370 articles on his research in the area of climate change, including more than 220 peer-reviewed papers.

John Ratliff – Ratliff was political director of an SEIU local union in Miami, Florida, and relocated to Cambridge after his retirement in 2012. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. A Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans for Peace, he is a member of the coordinating committee of Massachusetts Senior Action’s Cambridge branch, and chair of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice’s Global Justice Task Force. As Mass. Peace Action’s economic justice coordinator he leads our coalition work with Raise Up Massachusetts for an increased minimum wage and sick time benefits, and against the Trans Pacific Partnership. He is the father of high school senior Daniel Bausher-Belton, who was an intern at Mass. Peace Action in summer 2013.

Elaine Scarry – Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.  Her books include The Body in Pain, Thermonuclear Monarchy, and On Beauty and Being Just.

Paul Shannon – Shannon is program staff for the Peace and Economic Security program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Cambridge, hosts regular educational forums at the Cambridge Public Library for the AFSC and has coordinated the National AFSC Film Lending Library for the past 26 years. For over 3 decades he has been active in various peace, union, prison reform, solidarity, economic justice and human rights movements particularly the Vietnam anti-war movement, the 1970’s United Farm Workers movement, the South Africa anti-apartheid movement, the 1980’s Central America and Cambodia solidarity movements, the Haiti Solidarity movement of the early 90’s and the Afghanistan and Iraq anti-war movement. Paul has been teaching social science courses at colleges in the greater Boston area for the past 27 years. Since 1982 he has been teaching a course on the history of the Vietnam War at Middlesex Community College and occasionally teaches professional development courses on the Vietnam war for high school teachers at Northeastern University and Merrimack Educational Center. He is past editor of the Indochina Newsletter and has written numerous articles for peace movement publications. He is on the Board of Directors of the community/fan organization, Save Fenway Park. He currently represents the American Friends Service Committee on the Coordinating Committee of the United for Justice with Peace Coalition.

Denise Simmons – As Mayor of the City of Cambridge, Denise Simmons won praise for her open-door policy, for her excellent constituent services, and for her down-to-earth approach to her duties. She continues to bring these qualities to her work on the Cambridge City Council. She was sworn in to her second term as mayor on January 4, 2016.

Susie Snyder – Mrs. Susi Snyder is the Nuclear Disarmament Programme Manager for Pax in the Netherlands. Mrs. Snyder is a primary author of the Don’t Bank on the Bomb: Global Report on the  Financing of Nuclear Weapons Producers (2013, 2014, 2015) and has published numerous reports and articles, including the 2015 Dealing with a Ban & Escalating Tensions, the 2014 The Rotterdam Blast: The immediate humanitarian consequences of a 12 kiloton nuclear explosion;  and the 2011 Withdrawal Issues: What NATO countries say about the future of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. She is an International Steering Group member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Previously, Mrs. Snyder served as the International Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she monitored various issues under the aegis of the United Nations, including sustainable development, human rights, and disarmament.

Geoffrey Supran – Longstanding interest in optoelectronics. Opportunities to overcome scientific and economic hurdles in solar cell design and significantly impact world energy markets are alluring. Hybrid devices combining the flexibility, large area and tunable absorption of low cost solution processable nanocrystals (or polymers) with the high carrier mobility of, for example, III-V semiconductors, appear promising. In particular, enhancement of photocurrent by nonradiative energy transfer and carrier multiplication is of interest. Additionally, the importance of a nanoscale test-bed for fundamental studies of photo-induced energy/charge transport motivates my curiosity for the investigation of stand-alone photovoltaic single nanowire heterostructures. I am also interested in the development of photoelectrochemical storage catalysts and the pursuit of coupled photovoltaic-electrolysis systems.

Max Tegmark – Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, his scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book “Our Mathematical Universe”. He is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” He is founder (with Anthony Aguirre) of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Frank Wilczek – Frank Wilczek is a physics professor at MIT and a 2004 Nobel laureate for his work on the strong nuclear force. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross, he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold quarks together in protons and neutrons.

David Wright – David Wright is a nationally known expert on the technical aspects of nuclear weapons policy, missile defense systems, missile proliferation, and space weapons. He has authored numerous articles and reports on arms control and international security, including Toward True Security: Transforming U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, Securing the Skies: Ten Steps the United States Should Take to Improve the Security and Sustainability of Space, and The Physics of Space Security.

Maria T. Zuber – Zuber is a member of the National Science Board and the Vice President for Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also holds the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She is currently the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Organizers

We would like to extend a special thank you to our Program Committee and sponsors for all their help creating and organizing this event.

Prof. Aron Bernstein (MIT, Council for a Livable World), Abel Corver (Harvard University), Joseph Gerson (AFSC), Subrata Ghoshroy (MIT), Prof. Gary Goldstein (Tufts University), Cole Harrison (Mass Peace Action), Jonathan King (MIT and Mass Peace Action), Guntram Mueller (Mass Peace Action), Mary Popeo (Global Zero), John Ratliff (Mass Peace Action, Mass Senior Action), Mareena Robinson (Global Zero), Prof. Elaine Scarry (Harvard University), Prof.Max Tegmark (MIT, Future of Life Insitute), Patricia Weinmann (MIT Radius).

Sponsored by MIT Radius (the former Technology and Culture Forum), Massachusetts Peace Action, Future of Life Institute, MIT Global Zero, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – Boston Branch.

2nd International Workshop
13th February 2016 | Phoenix, Arizona USA

What is the future of AI? And what should we be doing about it now?

The focus of this workshop is on the ethical and societal implications of building AI systems. It follows a successful full-day workshop held at AAAI-15. There is an increasing appetite within and outside AI for such discussions. The workshop will consist of invited talks and tutorials, submitted papers, and one or more panel discussions. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• The future of AI
• AI as a threat to or saviour for humanity
• Mechanisms to ensure moral behaviours in AI systems
• Safeguards necessary within AI research
• Autonomous agents in the military
• Autonomous agents in commerce and other domains
• The impact of AI on work and other aspects of our lives

Tentative Schedule

09.00-10.15: AI and Ethics 1

Benjamin Kuipers | Human-like Morality and Ethics for Robots.

Joanna Bryson | Patiency Is Not a Virtue: AI and the Design of Ethical Systems.

Jessica Taylor | Quantilizers: A Safer Alternative to Maximizers for Limited Optimization.

10.15-10.45: Coffee.

10.15-11.20: Posters.

Tsvi Benson-Tilsen and Nate Soares | Formalizing Convergent Instrumental Goals.

Kaj Sotala | Defining Human Values for Value Learners

Aaron Isaksen, Julian Togelius, Frank Lantz and Andy Nealen | Playing Games Across the Superintelligence Divide.

Jason Wilson | Group Optimization: A Framework for Evaluation and Designing Human-Robot Relationships.

Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison | Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents.

Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith and Nicholas Mattei | Using “The Machine Stops” for Teaching Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science.

11.20-13.00: AI and Ethics 2

Toby Walsh|Why the Technological Singularity May Never Happen.

Miles Brundage | Modeling Progress in AI.

Roman Yampolskiy | Taxonomy of Pathways to Dangerous Artificial Intelligence

David Abel, James Macglashan and Michael Littman | Reinforcement Learning as a Framework for Ethical Decision Making.

13.00-14.00: Lunch.

14.00-15.00: AI & Safety 1

Max Tegmark & Richard Mallah | Introductory remarks on the history and importance of the AI safety and beneficence grants program, and the landscape of current funded AI projects and how they tie together conceptually.

Kaj Sotala | Teaching AI Systems Human Values Through Human-Like Concept Learning.

Vincent Conitzer | How to Build Ethics into Robust Artificial Intelligence.

Fuxin Li | Understanding When a Deep Network Is Going to Be Wrong

Francesca Rossi | Safety Constraints and Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Making Systems.

Bas Steunebrink | Experience-based AI (EXPAI)

15.00-16.00: AI & Safety 2

Manuela Veloso | Explanations for Complex AI Systems

Brian Ziebart | Towards Safer Inductive Learning

Percy Liang | Predictable AI via Failure Detection and Robustness

Benja Fallenstein | Aligning Superintelligence With Human Interests

Paul Christiano | Counterfactual Human Oversight

16.00-16.30: Coffee Break.

16.30-18.00: AI & Safety 3

Stuart Russell | Value Alignment and Moral Metareasoning

Stefano Ermon | Robust Probabilistic Inference Engines for Autonomous Agents

Benjamin Rubinstein | Security Evaluation of Machine Learning Systems

Panel discussion: What are the most promising research directions for keeping AI beneficial? (Russell, Conitzer, Parkes, Liang, Ermon, Rubinstein)

Location and Date

February 13th, 2016 at the Phoenix Convention Center: 100 N 3rd St, Phoenix, AZ 85004

For more information about the event and the participants, please visit the official AI, Ethics and Safety Workshop page.

Algorithms Among Us
The Societal Impacts of Machine Learning

Public interest in Machine Learning is mounting as the societal impacts of technologies derived from our community become evident. This symposium aims to turn the attention of Machine Learning researchers to the present and future consequences of our work, particularly in the areas of privacy, military robotics,  employment, and liability. These topics now deserve concerted attention to ensure the best interests of those both within and without Machine Learning: the community must engage with public discourse so as not to become the victim of it (as other fields have e.g. genetic engineering). The symposium will bring leaders within academic and industrial Machine Learning together with experts outside the field in order to debate the impacts of our algorithms and the possible responses we might adopt. A particular focus will be paid to technical areas of Machine Learning research that might serve to tackle some of the highlighted issues. A call for contributed content will be circulated (including the FLI grant awardees) to furnish a poster session.

Participants

Nick Bostrom, Professor, Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director, Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is renown for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, the reversal test, superintelligence risks, and consequentialism.  He is the author of over 200 publications, and has recently published his new New York Times bestseller “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.”

Erik Brynjolfsson is a Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Reasearch Associate at NBER,  and a Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. His current research is examining the effects of information technologies on business strategy, internet commerce, productivity and performance, pricing models, and intangible assets. Brynjolfsson has authored books, dozens of papers, and has even been able to be among the first researchers to measure and quantify productivity contributions of IT and the value of online product variety.

Tom Dietterich, Distinguished Professor and Director of Intelligent Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University. Dietterich is currently engaged in a wide range of research projects which work on Ecosystem Informatics and Computational Sustainability, Approximate Optimization for Bio-Economic Models, and Machine Learning for Species Distribution, to name a few. 

Ian Kerr is a recognized international expert in emerging technology and law issues. He is currently holding a Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law, and Technology at the University of Ottawa where he is also teaching a course on the ethical and legal implications of robots in society.

Neil Lawrence is a Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sheffield where he is working to develop the Open Data Science Initiative. His other research interests include probabilistic models with applications in computational biology and personalized helath.

Yann LeCun, Director of AI Research at Facebook & Silver Professor at the Courant Institute, New York University. LeCun is also affiliated with the NYU Center for Data Science and the Center for Neural Science. His current work involves AI, machine learning, computer perception, mobile robotics, and computational neuroscience. Among many other things, he has published over 180 technical papers and book chapters on topics such as handwriting recognition, image processing and compression, and dedicated circuits and architectures in computer perception.

Shane Legg, co-founder, Google DeepMind. Legg was awarded the Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Prize, and he has spent time at the Swiss Finance Institute working on models of cognitive bias in investor behavior. Legg now constructs powerful learning algorithms at Google DeepMind.

Percy Liang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Stanford University. The primary focus of Liang’s research is to create software that will allow humans to communicate with computers and to develop algorithms that can infer latent structures from raw data. He is a strong proponent of efficient and reproducible research and is currently working to develop CodaLab, a new platform that will allow researches to maintain full provenance of an experiment.

Andrew Ng, Associate Professor at Stanford; Chief Scientist of Baidu; and Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera. He led the development of Stanford’s main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform and also taught an online Machine Learning class that was offered to over 100,000 students. He founded and led the Google Brain project and is focused on deep machine learning.

Organizers

Michael Osborne (DPhil Oxon) is an Associate Professor in Machine Learning and co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on Technology and Employment at the University of Oxford. Dr Osborne has organised three previous NIPS workshops: ‘Bayesian Optimization in Theory and Practice’ (2013), ‘Probabilistic Numerics’ (2012) and ‘Bayesian Optimization, Experimental Design and Bandits: Theory and Applications’ (2011, and was also an Area Chair for NIPS 2014. Coupled to Dr Osborne’s work on foundational Machine Learning topics is an interest in inter-disciplinary collaboration to study the impact of computerization upon labour markets. This latter work has enjoyed broad and sustained media coverage (featured in BBC Newsnight, CNN, The Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Scientific American, TIME Magazine).

Murray Shanahan is Professor of Cognitive Robotics in the Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London, where he heads the Neurodynamics Group. He gained his PhD in computer science from Cambridge University (King’s College) in 1988. He took up a lectureship at Imperial College in 1998, where he became full professor in 2006. His publications span artificial intelligence, robotics, logic, dynamical systems, computational neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. His work up to 2000 was in the tradition of classical, symbolic AI, but since then has concerned brain-inspired cognitive architectures, neurodynamics, and consciousness. He was scientific adviser to the film Ex-Machina, which was partly inspired by by his book “Embodiment and the Inner Life”  (OUP, 2010). His new book “The Technological Singularity” will be published by MIT Press in August 2015. 

Adrian Weller is a Senior Research Associate in Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge. He is very interested in all issues related to intelligence (natural and artificial) and their applications, with primary research focus in inference in probabilistic graphical models. Dr Weller is an active angel investor and adviser, and previously held senior roles in investing and trading at Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers and Citadel. He received a PhD in computer science from Columbia and a first class degree in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. 

FLI would also like to extend a special thank you to Richard Mallah for his efforts to help the official NIPS organizers get this symposium set up.

Visit the official NIPS Symposium page for more details about the event.

This conference brought together the world’s leading AI builders from academia and industry to engage with each other and experts in economics, law and ethics. The goal was to identify promising research directions that can help maximize the future benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls (see this open letter and this list of research priorities). To facilitate candid and constructive discussions, there was no media present and Chatham House Rules: nobody’s talks or statements will be shared without their permission.
Where? San Juan, Puerto Rico
When? Arrive by evening of Friday January 2, depart after lunch on Monday January 5 (see program below)

Scientific organizing committee

• Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-author of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
• Demis Hassabis, Founder, DeepMind
• Eric Horvitz, Microsoft, co-chair of the AAAI presidential panel on long-term AI futures
• Shane Legg, Founder, DeepMind
• Peter Norvig, Google, Director of Research, co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach.
• Francesca Rossi, Univ. Padova, Professor of Computer Science, President of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach.
• Bart Selman, Cornell University, Professor of Computer Science, co-chair of the AAAI presidential panel on long-term AI futures
• Murray Shanahan, Imperial College, Professor of Cognitive Robotics
• Mustafa Suleyman, Founder, DeepMind
• Max Tegmark, MIT, Professor of physics, author of Our Mathematical Universe

Local Organizers

Anthony Aguirre, Meia Chita-Tegmark, Viktoriya Krakovna, Janos Kramar, Richard Mallah, Max Tegmark, Susan Young

Support: Funding and organizational support for this conference is provided by Skype-founder Jaan Tallinn, the Future of Life Institute and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk.

Program

Friday January 2

1600-late: Registration open
1930-2130: Welcome reception (Las Olas Terrace)

Saturday January 3

0800-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Overview (one review talk on each of the four conference themes)
• Welcome
• Ryan Calo (Univ. Washington): AI and the law
• Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT): AI and economics (pdf)
• Richard Sutton (Alberta): Creating human-level AI: how and when? (pdf)
• Stuart Russell (Berkeley): The long-term future of (artificial) intelligence (pdf)
1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1515: Free play/breakout sessions on the beach
1515-1545: Coffee & snacks
1545-1600: Breakout session reports
1600-1900: Optimizing the economic impact of AI
(A typical 3-hour session consists of a few 20-minute talks followed by a discussion panel where the panelists who haven’t already given talks get to give brief introductory remarks before the general discussion ensues.)
What can we do now to maximize the chances of reaping the economic bounty from AI while minimizing unwanted side-effects on the labor market?
Speakers:
• Andrew McAfee, MIT (pdf)
• James Manyika, McKinsey (pdf)
• Michael Osborne, Oxford (pdf)
Panelists include Ajay Agrawal (Toronto), Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT), Robin Hanson (GMU), Scott Phoenix (Vicarious)
1900: dinner

Sunday January 4

0800-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Creating human-level AI: how and when?
Short talks followed by panel discussion: will it happen, and if so, when? Via engineered solution, whole brain emulation, or other means? (We defer until the 4pm session questions regarding what will happen, about whether machines will have goals, about ethics, etc.)
Speakers:
• Demis Hassabis, Google/DeepMind
• Dileep George, Vicarious (pdf)
• Tom Mitchell, CMU (pdf)
Panelists include Joscha Bach (MIT), Francesca Rossi (Padova), Richard Mallah (Cambridge Semantics), Richard Sutton (Alberta)
1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1515: Free play/breakout sessions on the beach
1515-1545: Coffee & snacks
1545-1600: Breakout session reports
1600-1900: Intelligence explosion: science or fiction?
If an intelligence explosion happens, then what are likely outcomes? What can we do now to maximize the probability of a positive outcome? Containment problem? Is “friendly AI” possible? Feasible? Likely to happen?
Speakers:
• Nick Bostrom, Oxford (pdf)
• Bart Selman, Cornell (pdf)
• Jaan Tallinn, Skype founder (pdf)
• Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla Motors
Panelists include Shane Legg (Google/DeepMind), Murray Shanahan (Imperial), Vernor Vinge (San Diego), Eliezer Yudkowsky (MIRI)
1930: banquet (outside by beach)

Monday January 5

0800-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Law & ethics: Improving the legal framework for autonomous systems
How should legislation be improved to best protect the AI industry and consumers? If self-driving cars cut the 32000 annual US traffic fatalities in half, the car makers won’t get 16000 thank-you notes, but 16000 lawsuits. How can we ensure that autonomous systems do what we want? And who should be held liable if things go wrong? How tackle criminal AI? AI ethics? AI ethics/legal framework for military systems & financial systems?
Speakers:
• Joshua Greene, Harvard (pdf)
• Heather Roff Perkins, Univ. Denver (pdf)
• David Vladeck, Georgetown
Panelists include Ryan Calo (Univ. Washington), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State, AAAI president), Kent Walker (General Counsel, Google)
1200: Lunch, depart

Participants

You’ll find a list of participants and their bios here.

Back row, from left to right: Tom Mitchell, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Huw Price, Shamil Chandaria, Jaan Tallinn, Stuart Russell, Bill Hibbard, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Anders Sandberg, Daniel Dewey, Stuart Armstrong, Luke Muehlhauser, Tom Dietterich, Michael Osborne, James Manyika, Ajay Agrawal, Richard Mallah, Nancy Chang, Matthew Putman
Other standing, left to right: Marilyn Thompson, Rich Sutton, Alex Wissner-Gross, Sam Teller, Toby Ord, Joscha Bach, Katja Grace, Adrian Weller, Heather Roff-Perkins, Dileep George, Shane Legg, Demis Hassabis, Wendell Wallach, Charina Choi, Ilya Sutskever, Kent Walker, Cecilia Tilli, Nick Bostrom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Steve Crossan, Mustafa Suleyman, Scott Phoenix, Neil Jacobstein, Murray Shanahan, Robin Hanson, Francesca Rossi, Nate Soares, Elon Musk, Andrew McAfee, Bart Selman, Michele Reilly, Aaron VanDevender, Max Tegmark, Margaret Boden, Joshua Greene, Paul Christiano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, David Parkes, Laurent Orseau, JB Straubel, James Moor, Sean Legassick, Mason Hartman, Howie Lempel, David Vladeck, Jacob Steinhardt, Michael Vassar, Ryan Calo, Susan Young, Owain Evans, Riva-Melissa Tez, János Kramár, Geoff Anders, Vernor Vinge, Anthony Aguirre
Seated: Sam Harris, Tomaso Poggio, Marin Soljačić, Viktoriya Krakovna, Meia Chita-Tegmark
Behind the camera: Anthony Aguirre (and also photoshopped in by the human-level intelligence on his left)
Click here for a full resolution version.

When one of the world’s leading experts in Artificial Intelligence makes a speech suggesting that a third of existing British jobs could be made obsolete by automation, it is time for think tanks and the policymaking community to take notice. This observation – by Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford, Michael Osborne – was one of many thought provoking comments made at a special event on the policy implications of the rise of AI we held this week with the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. 

The event formed part of Policy Exchange’s long-running research programme looking at reforms that are needed in policies relating to welfare and the workplace – as well as other long-term challenges facing the country. We gathered together the world’s leading authorities on AI to consider the rise of this new technology, which will form one of the greatest challenges facing our society in this century. The speakers were the following:  

•    Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

•    Stuart Russell, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the standard textbook on AI.

•    Nick Bostrom, Professor at Oxford University, author of “Superintelligence” and Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute.

•    Michael Osborne. Associate Professor at Oxford University and co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on Technology and Employment.  

•    Murray Shanahan. Professor at Imperial College London, scientific advisor to the film Ex Machina, and author of “The Technological Singularity”

In this bulletin, we ask two of our speakers to share their views about the potential and risks from future AI:

Michael Osborne: Machine Learning and the Future of Work 

Machine learning is the study of algorithms that can learn and act. Why use a machine when we already have over six billion humans to choose from? One reason is that algorithms are significantly cheaper, and becoming ever more so.  But just as important, algorithms can often do better than humans, avoiding the biases that taint human decision making.  

There are big benefits to be gained from the rise of the algorithms. Big data is already leading to programs that can handle increasingly sophisticated tasks, such as translation. Computational health informatics will transform health monitoring, allowing us to release patients from their hospital beds much earlier and freeing up resources in the NHS. Self-driving cars will allow us to cut down on the 90% of traffic accidents caused by human error, while the data generated by their constant monitoring of the impact will have big consequences for mapping, insurance, and the law.

Nevertheless, there will be big challenges from the disruption automation creates. New technologies derived from mobile machine learning and robotics threaten employment in logistics, sales and clerical occupations.  Over the next few decades, 47% of jobs in America are at high risk of automation, and 35% of jobs in the UK. Worse, it will be the already vulnerable who are most at risk, while high-skilled jobs are relatively resistant to computerisation. New jobs are emerging to replace the old, but only slowly – only 0.5% of the US workforce is employed in new industries created in the 21st century. 

Policy makers are going to have to do more to ensure that we can all share in the great prosperity promised by technology.

Stuart Russell: Killer Robots, the End of Humanity, and All That: Policy Implications 

Everything civilisation offers is the product of intelligence. If we can use AI to amplify our intelligence, the benefits to humanity are potentially immeasurable. 

The good news is that progress is accelerating. Solid theoretical foundations, more data and computing, and huge investments from private industry have created a virtuous cycle of iterative improvement. On the current trajectory, further real-world impact is inevitable.

Of course, not all impact is good. As technology companies unveil ever more impressive demos, newspapers have been full of headlines warning of killer robots, or the loss of half of all jobs, or even the end of humanity. But how credible exactly are these nightmare scenarios? The short answer is we should not panic, but there are real risks that are worth taking seriously.

In the short term, lethal autonomous weapons or weapon systems that can select and fire upon targets on their own are worth taking seriously. According to defence experts, including the Ministry of Defence, these are probably feasible now, and they have already been the subject of three UN meetings in 2014-5. In the future, they are likely to be relatively cheap to mass produce, potentially making them much harder to control or contain than nuclear weapons. A recent open letter from 3,000 AI researchers argued for a total ban on the technology to prevent the start of a new arms race.

Looking further ahead, what, however, if we succeed in creating an AI system that can make decisions as well, or even significantly better than humans? The first thing to say is that we are several conceptual breakthroughs away from constructing such a general artificial intelligence, as compared to the more specific algorithms needed for an autonomous weapon or self-driving car. 

It is highly unlikely that we will be able to create such an AI within the next five to ten years, but then conceptual breakthroughs are by their very nature hard to predict. The day before Leo Szilard conceived of neutron-induced chain reactions, the key to nuclear power, Lord Rutherford was claiming that, “anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms is talking moonshine.”

The danger from such a “superintelligent” AI is that it would not by default share the same goals as us. Even if we could agree amongst ourselves what the best human values were, we do not understand how to reliably formalise them into a programme. If we accidentally give a superintelligent AI the wrong goals, it could prove very difficult to stop. 

For example, for many benign-sounding final goals we might try to give the computer, two plausible intermediate goals for an AI are to gain as many physical resources as possible and to refuse to allow itself to be terminated. We might think that we are just asking the machine to calculate as many digits of pi as possible, but it could judge that the best way to do so is turn the whole Earth into a supercomputer.

In short, we are moving with increasing speed towards what could be the biggest event in human history. Like global warming, there are significant uncertainties involved and the pain might not come for another few decades – but equally like global warming, the sooner we start to look at potential solutions the more likely we are to be successful. Given the complexity of the problem, we need much more technical research on what an answer might look like.

We organized our first conference, The Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges. This conference brought together the world’s leading AI builders from academia and industry to engage with each other and experts in economics, law and ethics. The goal was to identify promising research directions that can help maximize the future benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls. To facilitate candid and constructive discussions, there was no media present and Chatham House Rules: nobody’s talks or statements will be shared without their permission.

Most of the speakers have posted their talks. You’ll find a list of participants and their bios here.

Our Earth is 45 million centuries old. But this century is the first when one species ours can determine the biosphere’s fate. Threats from the collective “footprint” of 9 billion people seeking food, resources and energy are widely discussed. But less well studied is the potential vulnerability of our globally-linked society to the unintended consequences of powerful technologies not only nuclear, but (even more) biotech, advanced AI, geo-engineering and so forth. More information here.