The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) on the College of Oxford closed earlier this week.
The FHI was an interdisciplinary analysis group based in 2005 by thinker Nick Bostrom, who served as its director for its complete existence. He’ll now be leaving Oxford.
The closure of the FHI seems to be the results of choices by Oxford’s School of Philosophy. A statement on the FHI web site says:
Over time FHI confronted growing administrative headwinds inside the School of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational dwelling).
A “final report” on the FHI by Anders Sandberg supplies a bit of extra element:
Whereas FHI had achieved important tutorial and coverage affect, the ultimate years have been affected by a gradual suffocation by School forms. The versatile, fast-moving method of the institute didn’t perform nicely with the inflexible guidelines and gradual decision-making of the encircling group. (One in every of our directors developed a joke measurement unit, “the Oxford”. 1 Oxford is the quantity of labor it takes to learn and write 308 emails. That is the precise administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account inside the Philosophy School in order that we may begin utilizing it—after each the funder and the College had already accredited the grant.)
Beginning in 2020, the School imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Sadly, this led to the eventual lack of lead researchers and particularly the promising and various cohort of junior researchers, who’ve gone on to nice issues within the years since. Whereas constructing a formidable alumni community and ecosystem of latest nonprofits, these departures severely diminished the Institute. In late 2023, the School of Philosophy introduced that the contracts of the remaining FHI employees wouldn’t be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.
The explanations the School of Philosophy informed the FHI to cease hiring and fundraising haven’t been made public. It’s not clear whether or not it’s associated to personnel points, shifts in funding priorities, dissatisfaction with the analysis focus of the FHI, or one thing else altogether. (Please keep away from hypothesis about this within the feedback.)
The web site assertion summarizes that analysis focus:
FHI was concerned within the germination of a variety of concepts together with existential threat, efficient altruism, longtermism, AI alignment, AI governance, international catastrophic threat, grand futures, data hazards, the unilateralist’s curse, and ethical uncertainty. It additionally did important work on anthropics, human enhancement ethics, systemic threat modeling, forecasting and prediction markets, the seek for extraterrestrial intelligence, and on the attributes and strategic implications of key future applied sciences. One main contribution was in displaying that it was even doable to do rigorous analysis on large image questions on humanity’s future.
The report goes into larger element on this analysis and its affect, in addition to the assorted tutorial and public-facing actions of students on the FHI. You may learn it here.
