What is MIRI’s mission?

MIRI's mission statement is to “ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.” This is an ambitious goal, but they believe that some early progress is possible, and they believe that the goal’s importance and difficulty makes it prudent to begin work at an early date.

Their two main research agendas, “Agent Foundations for Aligning Machine Intelligence with Human Interests” and “Value Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems,” focus on three groups of technical problems:

• highly reliable agent design — learning how to specify highly autonomous systems that reliably pursue some fixed goal;

• value specification — supplying autonomous systems with the intended goals; and

• error tolerance — making such systems robust to programmer error.

That being said, MIRI recently published an update stating that they were moving away from research directions in unpublished works that they were pursuing since 2017.

They publish new mathematical results (although their work is non-disclosed by default), host workshops, attend conferences, and fund outside researchers who are interested in investigating these problems. They also host a blog and an online research forum.