Dear Viktoriya,
AI critics first used to claim AI is impossible, and after we explained to them for several decades that they are wrong, they are now claiming that it is the enemy of life. That is frustrating to anyone who knows the history of boring and ignorant AI critics like Searle and Penrose. I also haven’t read the longer mission statement in detail, and I think I would rather skip reading it, seeing that creationists and eschatologists are involved with your organization (most notably FHI/MIRI members). I would have ordinarily supported some of the research goals you listed, but I have my doubts about your true intentions. If you had wanted to accomplish any real good, there would only be actual AI researchers in your organization, not celebrities. Though celebrities may have improved the look of your web page, I believe that was a wrong thing to do. At this stage, this just looks like over-emphasis of near-trivial, popular science accounts of AI under the general heading of “AI Ethics” just as FHI does. For what it’s worth, I had written an unpublished pop-science paper on the arxiv on the subject, about perceived “risks” to the human society, and how to fix such risks, even with autonomous agents which are mostly unnecessary. It’s actually trivial to disprove almost every claim of FHI about AI, it’s just a load of pseudo-scientific nonsense, while my paper hopefully wasn’t, though it sort of reveals the absurdity of FHI/MIRI. 😉 In a nutshell, FHI/MIRI have a rather dim view of everything under the sun, including ethics. It’s just third-grade science fiction. I unfortunately cannot waste my time with an organization dominated by FHI/MIRI proponents, because I know them to be ignorant demagogues. Please accept this as honest criticism.
Kind Regards,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5380