Essay Abstract
I give a case that, as a public good, societies and their governments should support and invest in scientific research on crucial phenomena, empirical features of the world that figure strongly in how humanity's choices influence the size of its future. In particular, I give reasons for thinking that (1) humanity's vulnerability or robustness to accidents arising from biological engineering, and (2) the future rates of improvement of artificial intelligence and its susceptibility to misuse, are phenomena that call strongly for our systematic attention.
Author Bio
Daniel Dewey is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology and the Future of Humanity Institute. His research centres on high-impact, understudied features of the long-term future of artificial intelligence. Topics of particular interest include intelligence explosion, machine superintelligence, and AI ethics. Daniel was previously a software engineer at Google, Intel Labs Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University.