Future of Life granting an editor autonomous weapons?

@cregox Caue Rego
Mon, 05 Oct 2015 17:36:33 +0000

@cregox wrote:

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Title makes sense? I bet not.

I've met the Future of Life Institute (FLI) a while ago, thanks to their very famous open letter about "Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence". I've signed it. Probably everyone doing AI research did or will do. But I haven't read all of it. Didn't notice it was this big. I hope it's "just" formalising what we would expect.

Today @jorge pointed me to an Editor vacancy there. And it sounded exactly the job I'm already doing for basiux (the project I've created to develop AI)! Boy, do I want this job?!

So I now started paying more attention to FLI. And read most of its institutional site. It is quite aligned with basiux, even on their new open letter, about Autonomous Weapons, although I believe that's just a palliative measure and of very little importance.

No government will stop researching on AI and it only takes a few greedy researchers to push it forward. There's just no way to stop that from happening already, no matter how much awareness we can raise, this is a human limitation in our current condition in the evolution timeline.

Anyway, this is my application for the job. Or maybe for a grant (which is not taking applications right now). Or even for volunteering in, if that makes any sense. I suppose I should address the questions asked there:

How would I improve the website

Add a discourse forums, for one. That's not any kind of forums, mind you. Maybe a podcast. Chime in new movies being made, make a seal of scientific quality they may strive for, enjoy the success of Interstellar in that sense. Increase outreach in every way possible. If I could work for such a valuable company, man, I would be everywhere.

Other sites with attributes to emulate

None in AI field that I know of, but I'm already working in a project with @jorge there: www.flowyard.com - it's basically a jsfiddle for computer vision. So, that's one. Another site I'm really enjoy using is MeetUp.com FLI should definitely do something like nodeschool or many others who incentivize people to meet in their location. Give guidelines on what to do on meetups, or tools to be used there.

How would I generate the required content

I'm kinda already doing it all on my own, on my free time, including the meet ups. Google me up, go through all the links. Maybe you should start here: http://s.cregox.com/basiux-research

How to increase traffic to the website

Well, now that highly depends on what's already being done. I do know a lot about SEO, and it comes down to this: content. So, for one, I would love to do some fun videos to raise awareness, but first we'd have to align a lot of things and make a good plan on how to format it. I believe a realistic good goal for January 2016, in case of going with a video, is reaching 100k views. For 2017? 1M. But that also depends if I'll be focused on doing videos rather than all other tasks...

What budget do I need, other than my salary

That depends on my salary. Let's just say I may not need any extra budget, at least at first. Which means I also don't really know, but I do know I will go as cheap as possible until results start to appear, so I wouldn't ask for any budget as long as salary is good enough. I think it should be all on me, and I think I should be able to self manage it.

What past experience do I have with writing and/or website management

Here. This website is a good instance in itself. I've made it from scratch. Granted, the content in it is quite messy, but there's good quality in the blog. And I've been mostly a progammer* for almost 2 decades, I can manage a website. It's not exactly the same style as FLI, but I can adapt.

Science background

Now, that I don't have... But science is in my blood. Take a look at the edit history and comments there, when I wanted to give an answer for circumcision. Or at my "scientific research" (ok far from it, but I hope you get the point) towards podcast players. Also, the big reason I've created this forum was trying to improve SGU's forums. That was frustrating, but I mean, I feel a huge connection with Skeptics Guide to the Universe, a very scientific podcast, even if they properly don't call them so. So, yeah, no science background!

And what's up with Schwasneger (dam, still can't spell his name, thanks auto fix!) there? Well, you certainly know that singularity is often compared with SkyNet and the autonomous weapon isn't what he's holding in his hands, but it sure gives a good general picture of what you want as an editor there!

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