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The End of the Future of Humanity Institute — Daily Nous (April 18, 2024)
webMarks a significant institutional moment for the AI safety field: FHI was one of its founding research centers, and its closure signals shifting academic and organizational dynamics in the broader existential risk and AI safety ecosystem.
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Importance: 55/100news articlenews
Summary
Reports on the April 2024 closure of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), founded by Nick Bostrom in 2005, due to escalating administrative conflicts with Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy. The piece covers the institutional history, research contributions spanning existential risk, AI alignment, longtermism, and effective altruism, and the bureaucratic deterioration that led to hiring/fundraising freezes starting in 2020 and eventual shutdown.
Key Points
- •FHI closed April 16, 2024 after Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy imposed hiring and fundraising freezes starting in 2020, leading to loss of key researchers.
- •The closure was attributed to bureaucratic conflicts between FHI's flexible research culture and Oxford's rigid administrative processes, not publicly stated policy disagreements.
- •FHI pioneered research areas including existential risk, AI alignment, AI governance, longtermism, effective altruism, and moral uncertainty over its 19-year existence.
- •Nick Bostrom, FHI's founder and lifelong director, departed Oxford following the closure.
- •A final report by Anders Sandberg documents FHI's academic and policy impact, and its role in seeding a broader ecosystem of nonprofits and researchers.
Cited by 2 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Longtermism's Philosophical Credibility After FTX | -- | 50.0 |
| Future of Humanity Institute | Organization | 51.0 |
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The [Future of Humanity Institute](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/) (FHI) at the University of Oxford closed earlier this week.
The FHI was an interdisciplinary research group founded in 2005 by philosopher [Nick Bostrom](https://nickbostrom.com/), who served as its director for its entire existence. He will now be leaving Oxford.
The closure of the FHI appears to be the result of decisions by Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. A [statement](https://web.archive.org/web/20240417000845/https://www.futureofhumanityinstitute.org/) on the FHI website says:
_Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home)._
A “ [final report](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/660e95991cf0293c2463bcc8/t/661a3fc3cecceb2b8ffce80d/1712996303164/FHI+Final+Report.pdf)” on the FHI by [Anders Sandberg](https://archive.is/jrJYx) provides a little more detail:
_While FHI had achieved significant academic and policy impact, the final years were affected by a gradual suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy. The flexible, fast-moving approach of the institute did not function well with the rigid rules and slow decision-making of the surrounding organization. (One of our administrators developed a joke measurement unit, “the Oxford”. 1 Oxford is the amount of work it takes to read and write 308 emails. This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it—after both the funder and the University had already approved the grant.)_
_Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down._
The reasons the Faculty of Philosophy told the FHI to stop hiring and fundraising have not been made public. It’s not clear whether it is related to personnel or administrative issues, shifts in funding priorities, dissatisfaction with the research focus of the FHI, or something else altogether. (Please avoid speculation about this in the comments.)
The website statement summarizes that research focus:
_FHI was involved in the germination of a wide range of ideas including existential risk, effective altruism, longtermism, AI alignment, AI governance, global catastrophic risk, grand futures, information hazards, the unilateralist’s curse, and
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