At the moment, the "Get Involved" page only mentions donations. I certainly understand the need for donations, but I'm curious: are you considering other ways to involve the interested or passionate? As this is an outreach group, I suspect participation and communication both play a large part in your long term plans. Do you have any ideas for getting people more involved or connected with what you are doing, either through volunteering, discussion, or collaboration?
Thanks for posting this and putting the word out. The website and people involved (as well as those who have commented here) both make me think there is good potential here as an outreach organization.
Agreed! The "Get Involved" page has been fixed, and now also mentions volunteering. We have a number of locals from the Boston area who are attending our meetings and contributing to our projects, and a few remote volunteers as well.
Another way to get involved is to contribute to our "idea bank" by sending us suggestions for projects, talks, collaborations or research questions. Naturally, we will only be able to work on a fraction of the proposed ideas, but it's great to have a large pool to choose from. Thanks everyone for your contributions so far!
As of May 2014, there is an existential risk research and outreach organization based in the Boston area. The Future of Life Institute (FLI), spearheaded by Max Tegmark, was co-founded by Jaan Tallinn, Meia Chita-Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre and myself.
Our idea was to create a hub on the US East Coast to bring together people who care about x-risk and the future of life. FLI is currently run entirely by volunteers, and is based on brainstorming meetings where the members come together and discuss active and potential projects. The attendees are a mix of local scientists, researchers and rationalists, which results in a diversity of skills and ideas. We also hold more narrowly focused meetings where smaller groups work on specific projects. We have projects in the pipeline ranging from improving Wikipedia resources related to x-risk, to bringing together AI researchers in order to develop safety guidelines and make the topic of AI safety more mainstream.
Max has assembled an impressive advisory board that includes Stuart Russell, George Church and Stephen Hawking. The advisory board is not just for prestige - the local members attend our meetings, and some others participate in our projects remotely. We consider ourselves a sister organization to FHI, CSER and MIRI, and touch base with them often.
We recently held our launch event, a panel discussion "The Future of Technology: Benefits and Risks" at MIT. The panelists were synthetic biologist George Church, geneticist Ting Wu, economist Andrew McAfee, physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. The discussion covered a broad range of topics from the future of bioengineering and personal genetics, to autonomous weapons, AI ethics and the Singularity. A video and transcript are available.
FLI is a grassroots organization that thrives on contributions from awesome people like the LW community - here are some ways you can help: