Biographies: Anna Salamon


Anna Salamon is a Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Her work centers on analytical modeling of artificial intelligence risks and on probabilistic forecasting. She also serves as Director of the Institute’s Summer Fellows program. Previously, she conducted machine learning research at NASA Ames, and applied mathematics research at the Rohwer Phage Metagenomics lab.

Opening talk:

Shaping the intelligence explosion

How do you plan for a vast and unknown future? By seeking leverage: points from which you can see and address any threat, and from which you can see and reach out for any promise. Points that let you know what actions will bring what effects, and that let you know what effects you actually want.

Intelligence turns out to be the ultimate leverage. And while intelligence does not itself imply any specific goals, it turns out that one can build particular intelligent machines that have any particular goals stably built in -- machines that can design smarter machines, that can design still smarter machines, while all the while optimizing for one fixed notion of “good”. This is what we mean by “shaping the intelligence explosion” -- and it’s what the Singularity Institute is for.

Closing talk:

How much it matters to know what matters:
A back of the envelope calculation

How much time should you spend choosing your breakfast cereal? How about choosing your career, or your spouse? The mathematical concept of “value of information” describes the extent to which our decisions are likely to be better if we gather specific information before we act. In general, we can gain more of what we value if we focus research on decisions with high stakes and large but addressable unknowns.

The stakes around artificial intelligence are the entire world and its future. The unknowns are huge, and the avenues for reducing uncertainty are many. I’ll argue that makes such risk reduction one of history’s all-time best buys -- better than purchasing Manhattan for beads or investing in Google at its inception. If your values are like most people's, you may wish to take part.