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Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed.

Can anybody offer insight into the reasons here? Obviously there is not going to be an objective answer to this question. And that is probably why the linked page does not try to give an answer.

I'm assuming lack of funding wasn't the problem, since they froze fundraising (if the inability to raise funds was the problem it is unlikely that they would have done this).

Edit: looks like he got smeared in January of 2023, but that doesn't explain the freeze starting three years earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40066352

"Any organization embedded in a larger organization or community needs to invest to a certain degree in establishing the right kind of social relationships to maintain this embeddedness. Incentives must be aligned, and both parties must also recognize this alignment. We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty. There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important."

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/660e95991cf0293c2463b...

What an irony! The Bostrom Institute has to close in the midst of the spectacular rise of AI, and the all-important questions of AI risks and human value alignment are more hotly debated than ever.

I hope that Bostrom and his colleagues will continue and deepen their research, because humanity needs such insights now more than ever.

How does one research and generate insights for what does not exist yet? Is there a framework? At SXSW this year, there were a couple of talks about forecasting, as a tool for futurism, but where ethics are concerned, I’ve not seen a good template. Maybe all if this is obvious, yet I’m curious so I’m asking.
Is FHI even needed anymore? His ideas clearly won and took hold of a large group of people. AI doomerism is the default stance most people have on AI. e/acc makes up a tiny fraction of popular discourse today.
Future of Humanity Final Report from Anders Sandberg here:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/660e95991cf0293c2463b...

and Google Doc version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jgl2KqtiJ6lLkpoZ1I_VeniP...

I might be very biased:

- This report looks like it was put together in a week's time. - As an academic, I am sure the quality of the presentation is lower than that of 90% of the academic papers out there.

Good riddance.

A group of scammers without specialized education, theorizing about immortality (from people without medical education), saving humanity (thank you, but humanity thrives without your help), about ethics in artificial intelligence (from people who do not know any programming language), about drug promotion (from professional drug abusers), about pumping money into cryptocurrencies (which they personally purchased) and even crypto exchanges they own (hello SBF).

I hope to see all these people in jail (as I see they have already removed their names from the site).

I hate to break it to you, but these scholars are not going to jail for their bad ideas. That's not how a free society works. We'll have to settle for general disrepute.
I don't think FHI received any funding from SBF's Future Fund. (maybe a few of the visiting staff did, though)
EDIT: Got my “future of” institutes mixed up.
Tegmark’s institution is the Future of Life Institute, this is the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.

Tegmark’s institute is well-funded, apparently largely due to a big crypto donation from Vitalik Buterin. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/25/a-665m-crypto-war-c...

I'm literally laughing out loud at my desk right now XD
Or maybe some god scientist made an observation and the probability function collapsed in this non-funded state
Curious as to why they didn't explore independence, moving from Oxford to a separate non-profit org. Getting funded doesn't seem impossible given the amount of high-profile e/acc advocates.
I think they're the enemies of e/acc, and their EA background (due to FTX, SBF, etc.) taints them a bit when it comes to fundraising.
For a nonprofit research group with no patents/IP/etc, simply starting over with the same people is actually a better strategy than trying to "move". Nothing is lost (no capital, equipment, etc) and you don't have to deal with entanglements with the previous institution.
Because without institutional funding, one's sci-fi has to appeal to a mass audience to pay its way.
I think you are confusing EA and e/acc. EA was about billionaires defrauding the population who entrusted them with their money to give away to whatever cause was deemed best by the current "scientific" consensus in EA. Causes can include things like the suffering of fish or AI ending the known universe.

e/acc is about doing capitalism so hard so that AI will solve every problem.

Bear with a digression. CS Lewis was a professor at Oxford. His novel “That Hideous Strength” is about an organization that wants to use science to save humanity.

“It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too.”

— That Hideous Strength: (Space Trilogy, Book Three) (The Space Trilogy 3) by C. S. Lewis

Of course, it all goes very, very bad. The whole book can be read as a warning against what we now call transhumanism, obviously from a Christian perspective.

Given CS Lewis’s Oxford connection, I have always wondered if some of the faculty had their doubts about the FHI

While I do appreciate this reference and agree with CS Lewis here, I think it's a bit of a stretch to draw a connection between him and the present day Oxford philosophy faculty. He was a single don from nearly a century ago, who now really belongs to the canon at large rather than a single university. Perhaps the current faculty all hold some special reverence for him, but it seems more likely that modern mainstream philosophers (not only at Oxford) merely share with Lewis some basic grasp of common sense, which informs their skepticism of FHI and EA.
How is that any different than deity of religion will save humanity as any more/less believable?
I doubt that the philosophy faculty would take CS Lewis' opinion seriously into consideration. He was a decent storyteller, but not much of a philosopher.
Seems like they didn’t see it coming…
They did, I read the report. Probably since 2020 or 2021 at the latest.
Seems at first glance to be the same type slippery eel org as the 'Future of Life Institute'. They seem to have far more in common under the covers than just similar sounding names.
This 2023 incident around founder Nick Bostrom may have something to do with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#1996_email_contro...

From the wikipedia article:

> In January 2023, Bostrom issued an apology for a 1996 email where he had stated that he thought "Blacks are more stupid than whites", and where he also used the word "niggers" in a description of how he thought this statement might be perceived by others. The apology, posted on his website, stated that "the invocation of a racial slur was repulsive" and that he "completely repudiate[d] this disgusting email". In his apology, he wrote “I think it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity.”

Edit: also adding the second paragraph from Wikipedia to avoid accusations of smearing:

> In January 2023, Oxford University told The Daily Beast, "The University and Faculty of Philosophy is currently investigating the matter but condemns in the strongest terms possible the views this particular academic expressed in his communications." In August 2023, the investigation concluded (according to a letter Bostrom posted on his website) that "we do not consider [Bostrom] to be a racist or that [he holds] racist views, and we consider that the apology [he] posted in January 2023 was sincere."

Another member of this institute was effective altruist William MacAskill, who has appeared in media in 2023 in this context: "Sam Bankman-Fried and Will MacAskill weren't just philosophical allies. They were old friends."

https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...

From the OP:

> In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

I'm just speculating, but it stands to reason that the Institute became a PR net negative for Oxford (or this specific Faculty).

This is a smear taken out of context. What Bostrom actually had to say is both accurate and mild:

> “I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct,” the quoted excerpt begins. “Take for example the following sentence: Blacks are more stupid than whites. I like that sentence and I think it is true.

“But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were a ‘racist’: that I _disliked_ black people and thought it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’. I may be wrong about the facts, but that is what the sentence means for me. For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with: ‘I hate those bloody n------!!!!”

FHI/Bostrom's relationship with the university was damaged for years before the apology email.

They'd already frozen funding and hiring years earlier which means their issues go back even further than that.

Even the apology is sort of terrible. I'm not sure that I ever want it implied that black people have lower "cognitive capacity", whether or not it's said with recognition of social factors outside of our control. Social outcomes =/= cognitive capacity. And the causal factor here is poverty > race.
Good riddance to these ideologues. It's a shame that the announcement shows no trace of remorse for the crimes they inspired (e.g. at FTX) or the lives that have been ruined by the cults to which they lent academic legitimacy. Instead, their demise is chalked up to some bland moaning about "administrative headwinds".

Realistically, we're probably only looking at a brief respite before they regroup under some other benevolent-sounding name. Be on the lookout for their next incarnation, and let's hope that Oxford won't repeat the mistake of allowing them to evangelize under the seal of a great university.

(Edit in response to causal's question below):

They legitimized longtermism and pseudo-rational AI panic, which transformed much of EA into an apocalyptic sect, with all the high-demand group dynamics that come with it. Their research created an air of urgency and expediency which, among other bad outcomes, inspired the devoted EAs at FTX to justify their crimes to themselves. These crimes resulted in privation and a few suicides for their innocent depositors. To this day, there are EAs who rationalize these crimes against their outgroup as not that bad, considering that the "Future of Humanity" is at stake.

You can look at the movement and find plenty of other negative effects of this urgency and expediency, but for me personally, the FTX crimes are what woke me up to the true nature of these hazardous ideas.

The real question is whether Mr. Beast can make compelling content about saving the Future of Humanity Institute. If so, they're good.
> attempting to shield them from ordinary academic pressures

oh the poor darlings

The future is here?
i'm honestly glad, there seems to be a lot of places that may as well be called "the institute of impending doom for all of humanity" and i just don't care for this fear-based grant entrenchment, it gets us nowhere. people who are pioneering the front lines of any technology understand risk better than people who write about it
Seems the incompetent and curiously hostile Philosophy Faculty at Oxford killed FHI.

> While FHI had achieved significant academic and policy impact, the final years were affected by a gradual suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy. The flexible, fast-moving approach of the institute did not function well with the rigid rules and slow decision-making of the surrounding organization. (One of our administrators developed a joke measurement unit, “the Oxford”. 1 Oxford is the amount of work it takes to read and write 308 emails. This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it - after both the funder and the University had already approved the grant.) Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

The HN headline, "Future of Humanity Institute shuts down", sounds cynically funny, in context of current problems/challenges.

The grandiose name Oxford chose now sounds like they've determined the situation is hopeless.

The full final report is well worth a read for those with time on their hands: https://www.futureofhumanityinstitute.org/s/FHI-Final-Report...
Possibly because the future of humanity itself is in question?

"We're not going to make it, are we? Humans, I mean." --John Connor

On an unrelated note - my HN client UI breaks since the domain name is long xD