Seven of the papers (every one except the annotated bibliography) are referenced in the FLI research priorities document attached to the open letter which received a whole lot of recent publicity :-) Beyond that, it's a bit too early to guess how these particular papers will affect academia more broadly, but recent progress looks promising.
As a MIRI donor, glad to here it! Good luck to you guys, you're doing important work to say the least.
This week, I'm pleased to present Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests: An Annotated Bibliography. This annotated bibliography complements our technical agenda and the six supporting papers that I've released over the past few months. Once you've read the supporting papers, this annotated bibliography will help you figure out what to read next on any given topic, in order to get to the cutting edge.
This annotated bibliography concludes my series of updates on MIRI's technical agenda. To review, I've presented a series of eight papers which sketch out MIRI's research strategy and overview a number of active research areas. Those papers are: