Oxford University this week closed an academic institution run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, which specializes in Silicon Valley-backed ideas like the long-termism movement and effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years in operation. In 2015, Musk donated £1 million to FIH through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He has also been promoting its leadership ideas on X (formerly Twitter) for nearly a decade.
The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI displacing humanity have made him a celebrity among the tech elite and on lists of the world’s top thinkers. He is regularly named. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Tesla CEO Musk all wrote blurbs for the best-selling 2014 book “Superintelligence.”
“Superintelligence by Bostrom is worth reading. We need to be very careful when it comes to AI. Potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons,” Musk tweeted in 2014.
Mr Bostrom told the Guardian he had resigned from the University of Oxford following the institute’s closure.
The closure of the Bostrom Center is a further blow to the effective altruism and long-termism movement Bostrom has spent decades championing, but has been mired in racism-related scandals in recent years. sexual harassment and financial fraud.Bostrom himself I apologized last year After a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “black people are stupider than white people” and used the N-word.
Bostrom, who popularized the theory that humans may be living in a simulation, often echoed by Musk, wrote a lengthy final report posted this week on the institute’s website. In the interview, he talked about the institute’s closure. Although he praised the centre’s work, he said it was facing “administrative headwinds” from the University of Oxford and its philosophy department.
“The closure is the culmination of a process that has been underway for several years,” Bostrom told the Guardian in an email. “In 2005 he was initially awarded three years of funding, which has since been extended multiple times.
“Eventually peer pressures started to take effect (we were administratively housed within the philosophy department, even though most of the research team was non-philosophers at this point), and bureaucratic deaths began to take hold. came out.”
Bostrom said he was moved by the number of people speaking out in support of the institute’s work, adding that it was an honor to work with his colleagues.
“Fuji Heavy Industries was a special place with a unique and very fruitful intellectual culture,” Bostrom said. “I think I had a good run!”
The University of Oxford will freeze funding and recruitment in 2020, and the Faculty of Philosophy will not renew the contracts of the institute’s remaining staff at the end of 2023, according to a statement posted on the Future of Humanity website. It is said that the decision was made. Oxford and its philosophy department did not respond to requests for comment.
Effective altruism, the utilitarian belief that people should focus their lives and resources on maximizing the amount of global good they can do, is a philosophy that has gained significant momentum in recent years. It becomes. Philosophers who became central figures, such as Professor William MacAskill of Oxford University, subject to a huge amount of coverage and glossy magazine profiles. One of the movement’s biggest supporters was Sam Bankman Fried, the now-disgraced former billionaire who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
Bostrom was a supporter of a related long-termism movement, arguing that humanity should be concerned primarily with long-term existential threats to human survival, such as AI and space travel.Critics of long-termism tend to argue that this movement applies extreme calculation To a world that ignores concrete current issues such as climate change and poverty and leans toward authoritarian ideas. In a paper, Bostrom said, proposed a concept Universally worn “freedom tags” that use AI to constantly monitor individuals, linking suspicious activity to police and potentially arresting them for threatening humanity.
Bostrom and Longtermism have gained many powerful supporters over the years, including Musk and other tech billionaires.Bostrom Institute received £13.3m in 2018 Open Philanthropy Project – From a nonprofit financially supported by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz.
But the past few years have been turbulent for effective altruism, with Bankman Fried’s multibillion-dollar fraud scandal derailing the movement. spurred accusation those leaders warning ignored about his actions.Concerns that effective altruism is being used to disguise Bankman Freed’s reputation Questions about what’s good Effective altruistic organizations are indeed active and have proliferated in the years since his fall.
Meanwhile, Bostrom’s emails from the 1990s resurfaced last year, and he issued a statement denying his racist comments and clarifying his views on topics such as eugenics. Part of his answer – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to. further criticism His fellow scholars said he was on the run.
The university launched an investigation into Bostrom’s conduct following the discovery of his racist emails, while other major Effective Altruism groups distanced themselves from him.
The Center for Effective Altruism, founded by fellow philosophers at the University of Oxford and funded by Bankman Fried, said in a statement at the time: “We condemn Nick Bostrom’s reckless, flawed and reprehensible words. We unequivocally condemn this,” the statement said.
