Progress updates are nice, but without a previously defined metric for success it's hard to know whether an organization's achievements are noteworthy or not. Is SI making good progress, or underwhelming progress?

Luckily, in August 2011 we published a strategic plan that outlined lots of specific goals. It's now almost August 2012, so we can check our progress against the standard set nearly one year ago. The plan doesn't specify a timeline for the stated goals, but I remember hoping that we could do most of them by the end of 2012, while understanding that we should list more goals than we could actually accomplish given current resources.

Let's walk through the goals in that strategic plan, one by one. (Or, you can skip to the "summary and path forward" section at the end.)

1.1. Clarify the open problems relevant to our core mission

This was accomplished to some degree with So You Want to Save the World, and is on track to be accomplished to a greater degree with Eliezer's sequence "Open Problems in Friendly AI," which you should begin seeing late in August.

1.2. Identify and recruit researcher candidates who can solve research problems.

Several strategies for doing this were listed, but the only one worth doing at our current level of funding was to recruit more research associates and hire more researchers. Since August 2011 we have done both, adding half a dozen research associates and hiring nearly a dozen remote researchers, including a few who are working full-time on papers and other projects (e.g. Kaj Sotala).

1.3. Use researchers and research associates to solve open problems related to Friendly AI theory.

I never planned to be doing this by the end of 2012; it's more of a long-term goal. A first step in this direction is to have Eliezer transition back to FAI work, e.g. with his "Open Problems in Friendly AI" Summit 2011 talk and forthcoming blog sequence. And actually, SI research associate Vladimir Slepnev has been making interesting progress in LW-style decision theory, and is working on a paper explicating one of his results. (Some credit is due to Vladimir Nesov and others.)

1.4. Estimate current AI risk levels.

Alas, we haven't done much of this. There's some analysis in Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import, Reply to Holden on Tool AI, and Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute. Also...