It's worth noting that your current name has advantages too; people who are interested in the accelerating change singularity will naturally run into you guys. These are people, some pretty smart, who are at home with weird ideas and like thinking about the far future. Isn't this how Louie found out about SI?
Maybe instead of changing your name, you could spin out yet another organization (with most of your current crew) to focus on AI risk, and leave the Singularity Institute as it is to sponsor the Singularity Summit and so on. My impression is that SI has a fairly high brand value, so I would think twice before discarding part of that. Additionally, I know at least one person assumed the Singularity Summit was all you guys did. So having the summit organized independently of the main AI risk thrust could be good.
I agree. You should change the name iff your current name-brand is irreparably damaged. Isn't that an important decision procedure for org rebrands? I forget.
EDIT: Unless, of course, the brand is already irreparably damaged...in which case this "advice" would be redundant!
Once, a smart potential supporter stumbled upon the Singularity Institute's (old) website and wanted to know if our mission was something to care about. So he sent our concise summary to an AI researcher and asked if we were serious. The AI researcher saw the word 'Singularity' and, apparently without reading our concise summary, sent back a critique of Ray Kurzweil's "accelerating change" technology curves. (Even though SI researchers tend to be Moore's Law agnostics, and our concise summary says nothing about accelerating change.)
Of course, the 'singularity' we're talking about at SI is intelligence explosion, not accelerating change, and intelligence explosion doesn't depend on accelerating change. The term "singularity" used to mean intelligence explosion (or "the arrival of machine superintelligence" or "an event horizon beyond which we can't predict the future because something smarter than humans is running the show"). But with the success of The Singularity is Near in 2005, most people know "the singularity" as "accelerating change."
How often do we miss out on connecting to smart people because they think we're arguing for Kurzweil's curves? One friend in the U.K. told me he never uses the world "singularity" to talk about AI risk because the people he knows thinks the "accelerating change" singularity is "a bit mental."
LWers are likely to have attachments to the word 'singularity,' and the term does often mean intelligence explosion in the technical literature, but neither of these is a strong reason to keep the word 'singularity' in the name of our AI Risk Reduction organization. If the 'singularity' term is keeping us away from many of the people we care most about reaching, maybe we should change it.
Here are some possible alternatives, without trying too hard:
We almost certainly won't change our name within the next year, but it doesn't hurt to start gathering names now and do some market testing. You were all very helpful in naming "Rationality Group". (BTW, the winning name, "Center for Applied Rationality," came from LWer beoShaffer.)
And, before I am vilified by people who have as much positive affect toward the name "Singularity Institute" as I do, let me note that this was not originally my idea, but I do think it's an idea worth taking seriously enough to bother with some market testing.