A retrospective in Asterisk issue 8 on the Future of Humanity Institute, subtitled "the rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk."
The closure
"On April 16, 2024, the website of the Future of Humanity Institute was replaced by a simple landing page and a four-paragraph statement. The institute had closed down, the statement explained, after 19 years." The statement "referred to 'increasing administrative headwinds' blowing from the University of Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy, in which it had been housed."
What FHI did
Ough describes the institute's mission as studying "humanity's big-picture questions: our direst perils, our range of potential destinies, our unknown unknowns," and credits its researchers as "among the first to usher concepts such as superintelligent AI into academic journals and bestseller lists alike, and to speak about them before such groups as the United Nations."
The assessment is explicitly two-sided. To its supporters, "this group of polymaths and eccentrics, led by the visionary philosopher Nick Bostrom, had seeded entire fields of study, alerted the world to grave dangers, and made academia's boldest attempts to see into the far future." Against that: "not everyone agreed with its prognostications. And, among insiders, the institute was regarded as needlessly difficult to deal with — perhaps to its own ruin." Ough relays the detractors' line that "the one thing FHI had not foreseen… was its own demise."
The internal account
The piece includes first-hand material on the institute's deterioration. Owen Cotton-Barratt's open letter, which "eventually reached the philosophy faculty," is characterized by its author in 2024 as constructive: "I think Nick did a great job building FHI, and the world has lost somewhere special. I wrote that letter in the hope that it might help FHI to iterate towards the best version of itself."
Bostrom's reading differs. He "viewed the letter as well-meaning, but 'a bit of a facepalm'," describing it as arising "from an effective altruist culture of extreme openness" while holding that it "set us back administratively by about a year."
The disagreement is recorded here rather than resolved: the same document is read as an attempt at institutional repair and as a self-inflicted administrative cost, and both readings come from participants.
After the pandemic, FHI staff reassembled at Trajan House on the outskirts of Oxford.
Relationships
- related: Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) — the institution the piece assesses
- related: Nick Bostrom — FHI's founding director
- related: AI Existential Risk, Effective Altruism, Longtermism