Singularity Institute Call for Volunteers
Are you interested in reducing existential risk? Are you a student who wants to donate to existential risk reduction, but doesn't have any money? Are you a past or present Visiting Fellow applicant? Do you want to apply to the Visiting Fellows program, but can't take time off work or school? If the answer to any one of these questions is yes, you should join the Singularity Institute Volunteer Program. The Singularity Institute is looking for volunteers to do things like:
- Review and proofread SIAI publications.
- Promote SIAI sites like singinst.org and lesswrong.com.
- Contribute content to the SIAI Blog.
- Create online videos or other digital content.
- Volunteer for the 2010 Singularity Summit.
- Organize monthly dinner parties to cultivate new supporters.
- Translate SIAI webpages into other languages, e.g. French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, etc.
- Contribute to the collaborative rationality blog Less Wrong.
- Host a Less Wrong meetup, or remind organizers to host them.
Requirements for volunteers are fairly minimal, but you must be able to:
- Read and write English on a basic or higher level
- Complete tasks reliably with minimal supervision
- Stick to deadlines, and let us know if you can't meet them
Additional skills, like programming, ability to write well, foreign languages, math talent, etc. are a definite plus. If you are interested, please shoot us an email with a brief summary of who you are, what your interests and skills are and how you'd like to help.
If you want to contribute, but don't know how you can help, please email SIAI Volunteer Coordinator Louie Helm at louie.helm@singinst.org.
If you already have a project or projects that you think might be relevant to reducing existential risks, please email SIAI Visiting Fellow Thomas McCabe at tom.mccabe@singinst.org.
If you want to volunteer for the 2010 Singularity Summit, held in San Francisco on August 14th-15th, please email SIAI Summit Organizer Aruna Vassar at aruna.vassar@singinst.org, even if you can't attend the Summit in person.
Apply today!
Being able to make collective choices at all seems to be an obvious benefit, even given pure selfishness. To consider a simpler example, imagine a group of twelve purely selfish soldiers. Would these soldiers agree to appoint a lieutenant, who they would agree to obey the orders of? Well, if they do appoint a lieutenant, there's a chance that the lieutenant will order them to do something dangerous. But if they don't appoint a lieutenant, they won't be able to fight effectively and will all be killed by the enemy anyway. The selfish choice is clearly to appoint the lieutenant.
"People seem to make a leap from "This is 'bounded'" to "The bound must be a reasonable-looking quantity on the scale I'm used to." The power output of a supernova is 'bounded', but I wouldn't advise trying to shield yourself from one with a flame-retardant Nomex jumpsuit." - http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/
Singularity Summit 2010 on Aug. 14-15 in San Francisco
The Singularity Summit 2010 will be held on August 14th and 15th at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, and will feature Ray Kurzweil and famed Traditional Rationalist James Randi as speakers, in addition to numerous others. During last year's Summit (in New York City), there was a very large Less Wrong meetup with dozens of attendees, and it is quite possible that there will be one again this year. Anyone interested in planning such a meetup (not just attending) should contact the Singularity Institute at institute@singinst.org. The Singularity Summit press release follows after the jump.
"You can't assign a life insurance policy to a non-profit organization?"
You can, but it probably won't pay out until relatively far into the future, and because of SIAI's high discount rate, money in the far future isn't worth much.
"Is the long-term viability of low-cost cryonics a known quantity? Is it noticeably similar to the viability of high-cost cryonics?"
Yes. The Cryonics Institute has been in operation since 1976 (35 years) and is very financially stable.
"Did Michael Anissimov, Media Director for SIAI, when citing specific financial data available on Guidestar, lie about SIAI's budget in the linked blog post?"
Probably not, he just wasn't being precise. SIAI's financial data for 2008 is available here (guidestar.org) for anyone who doesn't believe me.
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I did have marketing in mind, yes, but the first paragraph also serves an obviously useful purpose: it declares what audience we are trying to address. People who are not interested in existential risks or the Visiting Fellows program probably won't be as interested in volunteering, and it saves everyone a lot of time to state that up front.