Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence: The Philanthropic Opportunity by Holden Karnofsky. Somehow missed this when it was posted in May.

Compare, for example, Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) one of the most highly upvoted posts ever on LessWrong.

Edit: See also Some Key Ways in Which I've Changed My Mind Over the Last Several Years

Everything is heritable:

• Evolution:

  • "Divergent Ah receptor ligand selectivity during hominin evolution", Hubbard et al 2016 (Evolution to tolerate smoke poisoning, 350-45kya)
  • "Genetic Markers of Human Evolution Are Enriched in Schizophrenia", Srinivasan et al 2016 (Our evolution is not yet complete: evolution is still working out the kinks. Fortunately, we don't have to wait for it to finish the job.)
  • "Genetic Associations Between Personality Traits and Lifetime Reproductive Success in Humans", Berg et al 2016 (contemporary selection for personality traits)
  • "How cognitive genetic factors influence fertility outcomes: A mediational SEM analysis", Woodley et al 2016 (More on dysgenics in the USA: mostly mediated through education's effects on fertility.)
  • "Humans Never Stopped Evolving: The emergence of blood abnormalities, an adult ability to digest milk, and changes in our physical appearance point to the continued evolution of the human race"
  • "Rapid evolutionary response to a transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils", Epstein et al 2016 (quick evolution through soft selection sweeps)
• "Phenome-wide Heritability Analysis of the UK Biobank", Ge et al 2016 (SNP heritability for 551 complex traits)
• "Identification of 15 genetic loci associated with risk of major depression in individuals of European descent", Hyde et al 2016
• "Associations between Polygenic Risk for Psychiatric Disorders and Substance Involvement", Carey et al 2016
• "Genetic Prediction of Male Pattern Baldness", Hagenaars et al 2016 (baldness GCTA of 52%, and GWAS with 250 new hits from the UK Biobank.)
• "Sweet Taste Perception is Associated with Body Mass Index at the Phenotypic and Genotypic Level", Hwang et al 2016
• "Analysis of Intellectual Disability Copy Number Variants for Association With Schizophrenia", Rees et al 2016 (more on the pervasive genetic overlap between mental illnesses/intellectual problems)
• "Heritability and causal reasoning", Lynch 2016
• "Genes, Evolution and Intelligence", Bouchard 2014
• "Prevalence of Congenital Amusia", Peretz & Vuvan 2016

Politics/religion:

• "Evolution is Not Relevant to Sex Differences in Humans Because I Want it That Way! Evidence for the Politicization of Human Evolutionary Psychology", Geher & Gambacorta 2016
• "Science Is Not Always "Self-Correcting": Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence", Cofnas 2015 (scientific endorsement of the Noble Lie) Academia, liberalism, and propensity to blank slate beliefs like believing hens & roosters differ due to nurture:
• "Insane. Invisible. In danger. Florida cut \$100 million from its mental hospitals. Chaos quickly followed"
• "The Drugs Won: The Case for Ending the Sports War on Doping"
• "Incorruptibly Evil"
• "Is God an Accident?"
• "The Lie Factory: How politics became a business"
• "Intelligence challenged people and free speech"
• Stanislav Petrov

AI:

• "Decoupled Neural Interfaces using Synthetic Gradients", Jaderberg et al 2016 (DeepMind explainer; potentially allows for extreme parallelization of neural nets across GPUs)
• "Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?", Lin & Tegmark 2016 (Tegmark tries to explain from a physics perspective why deep learning works.)
• "Densely Connected Convolutional Networks", Huang et al 2016 (A new twist on highway/residual/fractal networks, with further records set on image tasks.)
• "How To Save Mankind From The New Breed of Killer Robots" (Tool AIs want to become agent AIs.)
• "Apprenticeship learning using Inverse Reinforcement Learning"

Statistics/meta-science:

• "How Multiple Imputation Makes a Difference", Lall 2016 (many political science results biased & driven by treatment of missing data)
• Fundamental theorem of poker
• "Dynamic Programming in Python: Bayesian Blocks"

Psychology/biology:

• "Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes", Sariaslan et al 2016 (Terrifyingly large within-family estimates, and the risk increases with age in adolescence.)
• "Heads or tails: the impact of a coin toss on major life decisions and subsequent happiness", Levitt 2016 (You can randomize anything if you're sufficiently clever about it - even having babies, quitting jobs, moving, or starting a business. Arguably, like computer chess or 'comfort zone expansion', this suggests humans may be too risk-averse: the people on the margin, the 6% who apparently could be swayed by a coin flip, should be making these decisions more often, suggesting a bias towards the status quo.)
• "The Long-Term Impact of International Migration on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from a Migration Lottery and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments", Gibson et al 2016 (Many traits are stable. Migrants aren't going to become more patient, intelligent, peaceful, pro-capitalism, or long-term oriented just because they've immigrated to your country.)
• "To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep", Gillen-O'Neel et al 2013
• "We Add Near, Average Far"

A Quantum of Consciousness

Broadly speaking, suggestions about the mechanisms that might cause consciousness can be grouped into three: (i) the vital spark of life, (ii) an emergent property from basic control functions of the central nervous system and (iii) a special relationship between spooky quantum interactions and life.

But repeated experiments have shown that electron transfer in photosynthesis has an efficiency greater than ninety-nine percent, probably because of superposition and electron tunnelling.

And evidence is gathering that many enzymes may use spookiness for electron transfer. Enzymes are the classic controlling agents for the body’s biochemistry: the hierarchy is that DNA makes RNA makes enzymes, which then go on to regulate everything else. Many other biological systems are currently being investigated for quantum influences such as vision, olfaction, magnetoreception (detecting magnetic fields) and Brownian motors (typically nano-scale engines in a cell that convert chemical into mechanical energy)."

"Maybe, just maybe, consciousness is an emergent property of the positive and negative feedbacks between quantum mechanics effects at the level of single ions and an overarching electromagnetic field around the brain."

"To conclude we have no evidence that consciousness and self-awareness are caused by the number of links in a digital system."

http://www.baen.com/quantum_consciousness