Junior researchers are often wondering what they should work on. To potentially help, we asked people at the Centre for the Governance of AI for research ideas related to longtermist AI governance. The compiled ideas are developed to varying degrees, including not just questions, but also some concrete research approaches, arguments, and thoughts on why the questions matter. They differ in scope: while some could be explored over a few months, others could be a productive use of a PhD or several years of research. 

We do not make strong claims about these questions, e.g. that they are the absolute top priority at current margins. Each idea only represents the views of the person who wrote it. The ideas aren’t necessarily original. Where we think someone is already working on or has done thinking about the topic before, we've tried to point to them in the text and reach out to them before publishing this post.

If you are interested in pursuing any of these projects, please let us know by filling out this form. We may be able to help you find mentorship, advice, or collaborators. You can also fill out the form if you’re intending to work on the project independently, so that we can help avoid duplication of effort. If you have feedback on the ideas, feel free to email researchideas@governance.ai.

You can find the ideas here. Our colleagues at the FHI AI Safety team put together a corresponding post with AI safety research project suggestions here.

Other Sources

Other sources of AI governance research projects include: 

• AI Governance: A Research Agenda, Allan Dafoe
• Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline, 80,000 Hours
• The section on AI in Legal Priorities Research: A Research Agenda, Legal Priorities Project
• Some parts of A research agenda for the Global Priorities Institute, Global Priorities Institute
• AI Impact’s list of Promising Research Projects
• Phil Trammell and Anton Korinek's Economic Growth under Transformative AI
• Luke Muehlhauser's 2014 How to study superintelligence strategy
• You can also look for mentions of possible extensions in papers you find compelling

A list of the ideas in the document:

• The Impact of US Nuclear Strategists in the early Cold War
• Transformative AI and the Challenge of Inequality
• Human-Machine Failing
• Will there be a California Effect for AI?
• Nuclear Safety in China
• History of existential risk concerns around nanotechnology
• Broader impact statements: Learning lessons from their introduction and evolution
• Structuring access to AI capabilities: lessons from synthetic biology
• Bubbles, Winters, and AI
• Lessons from Self-Governance Mechanisms in AI
• How does government intervention and corporate self-governance relate?
• Summary and analysis of “common memes” about AI, in different communities
• A Review of Strategic-Trade Theory
• Mind reading technology
• Compute Governance ideas
  • Compute Funds
  • Compute Providers as a Node of AI Governance
  • China’s access to cutting edge chips
  • Compute Provider Actor Analysis