The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute has recently published a series of organization updates, plans, and related content. I’m writing to draw your attention to that and solicit any feedback you may have.

Please see our blog post Summary of GCRI’s 2018-2019 Accomplishments, Plans, and Fundraising. This provides an overview of everything and links to further discussions.

Here are the main points I would emphasize:

In 2018, we published six high-quality research papers and led a major outreach initiative to the United States Congress on national security dimensions of artificial intelligence. (UPDATE: To clarify, the six research papers were separate from the outreach initiative. Apologies for any confusion on this.) We did this with ~1.5 full-time workers on a budget of around $140,000. We believe this to be an unusually cost-effective operation.

GCRI may now be at a turning point. We have done a lot of excellent work at a small scale, and we have an important and distinctive role to play in addressing global catastrophic risk. Now, we seek to scale up to play that role better.

GCRI’s overall role is to advance an intelligent and practical response to global catastrophic risk. We do this by working at the intersection of academic scholarship and real-world decision-making. We bring unique expertise on social science, risk and decision analysis, and the breadth of global catastrophic risks, in addition to our extensive professional networks. Without in any way diminishing the work being done by other organizations, we believe it is important for GCRI to scale up.

To start scaling up, we are seeking to raise $1.5 million. This will cover our leadership team (Tony Barrett, Robert de Neufville, and myself) over three years plus a modest discretionary budget to expand further. Of this, we have already raised $250,000, which will cover de Neufville and myself in 2019 for research and outreach on AI.

We would be grateful for any further donations and funding leads. To help with this, please visit our donate page or contact me directly.

We also sincerely welcome your input, ideas, criticisms, suggestions, etc., either in the comment thread below or via private email to me.