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Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
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Pablo
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3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
FHI (Oxford) was one of the founding institutions of modern AI safety and existential risk research; this final report is a significant historical document for understanding the field's development and institutional challenges.
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eaforum
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Building effective altruismFuture of Humanity InstituteAnnouncements and updatesOrganization updatesPostmortems & retrospectivesHistory of effective altruism
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Importance: 72/100organizational reportprimary source
Summary
Anders Sandberg's retrospective on FHI's 19-year history documents the institute's research contributions, organizational lessons, and ultimate closure. The report reflects on what worked and what didn't in pioneering existential risk research, offering practical guidance for future organizations tackling neglected long-term global challenges.
Key Points
- •FHI helped establish existential risk, AI safety, and longtermism as legitimate research fields over nearly two decades of interdisciplinary work.
- •The report highlights the value of institutional independence from academic fashion when working on pre-paradigmatic, unconventional research topics.
- •Diverse interdisciplinary teams were identified as critical to FHI's ability to generate novel insights across biosecurity, AI, and global catastrophic risks.
- •The closure reflects ongoing challenges of sustaining unconventional research within traditional university structures and shifting funding landscapes.
- •Serves as both an institutional post-mortem and a practical blueprint for future high-impact research organizations in the existential risk space.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
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| Longtermism's Philosophical Credibility After FTX | -- | 50.0 |
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Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report — EA Forum
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by Pablo Apr 17 2024 6 min read 89 224
Building effective altruism Future of Humanity Institute Announcements and updates Organization updates Postmortems & retrospectives History of effective altruism Frontpage Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report What we did well Where we failed So, you want to start another FHI? 89 comments This is a linkpost for https://static1.squarespace.com/static/660e95991cf0293c2463bcc8/t/661a3fc3cecceb2b8ffce80d/1712996303164/FHI+Final+Report.pdf Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI’s closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow.
Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision. This document is the reverse: an epitaph summarizing what the Future of Humanity Institute was, what we did and why, what we learned, and what we think comes next. It can be seen as an oral history of FHI from some of its members. It will not be unbiased, nor complete, but hopefully a useful historical source. I have received input from other people who worked at FHI, but it is my perspective and others would no doubt place somewhat different emphasis on the various strands of FHI work.
What we did well
One of the most important insights from the successes of FHI is to have a long-term perspective on one’s research. While working on currently fashionable and fundable topics may provide success in academia, aiming for building up fields that are needed, writing papers about topics before they become cool, and staying in the game allows for creating a solid body of work that is likely to have actual meaning and real-world effect.
The challenge is obviously to create enough stability to allow such long-term research. This suggests that long-term funding and less topically restricted funding is more valuable than big funding.
Many academic organizations are turned towards other academic organizations and recognized research topics. However, pre-paradigmatic topics are often valuable, and relevant research can occur in non-university organizations or even in emerging networks that only later become organized. Having the courage to defy academic fashion and “investing” wisely in such pre-paradigmatic or neglected domains (and networks) can reap good rewards.
Having a diverse team, both in terms of backgrounds but also in disciplines, proved valuable. But this was not always easy to achieve within the rigid administrative structure that we operated in. Especially senior hires with a home discipline in a faculty other than philosophy were nearly impossible to arrange. Conversely, by making it impossible to hire anyone not from a conventional aca
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