Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher
Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers.
The
Future of Humanity Institute,
dedicated to the long-termism movement
and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism,
closed this week after 19 years of operation.
Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence.
He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.
The center was run by
Nick Bostrom
, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term
threat of AI replacing humanity
turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers.
OpenAI chief executive Sam #Altman, Microsoft founder Bill #Gates and Tesla chief #Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book #Superintelligence.
“Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes,” Musk tweeted in 2014.
️#Bostrom resigned from Oxford following the institute’s closure.
️
The closure of Bostrom’s center is a
further blow to the "#effective #altruism" and #longtermism movements
that the philosopher has spent decades championing,
which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to #racism, #sexual #harassment and #financial #fraud.
Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed
“Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/oxford-future-of-humanity-institute-closes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other