Fellowship AI for Human Reasoning
The Future of Life Foundation (FLF) is delighted to invite applications for our fellowship in AI for Human Reasoning.
AI progress is already reshaping the world. We expect this to continue, and to pick up pace. This may bring immense new challenges — but it could also bring unprecedented opportunities for tools which help people to better orient to and work together to face those challenges.
By AI for human reasoning, we mean tools and applications that help people to make sense of the changing world and working out what they should do. We are ultimately most interested in tools which could help to differentially empower humans, and give them a better shot at handling the challenges that advanced AI may bring.
This could include tools for:
“raising the epistemic ceiling” — giving plugged-in people a better understanding of the situation we are in, or of their own situation.
“raising the epistemic floor” — helping everyone navigate adversarial informational environments and sensemake a confusing world.
“mediation and negotiation”, to make it easier for individuals and groups to identify win-win solutions and to help racing actors find off-roads.
“helping collective action”, to empower large groups like the general public to coordinate vs small cliques.
Right now, we believe:
The world is radically underinvested in these beneficial applications;
Many people have not yet had the opportunity to take these prospects seriously.
Our fellowship — somewhere between a research fellowship and a startup incubator — is designed to help address these gaps. Fellows will spend time thinking about and discussing potential beneficial applications — and then building roadmaps, evals, and prototypes. We will connect them to researchers on our team, and people working on related projects at existing organizations. Ultimately we will invite them to present their work to us and other researchers, builders, and potential funders in the space. It is our hope that in some cases the seeds which germinate in the fellowship may grow into projects which provide the world with important new tools.
What will the fellowship involve?
You are ultimately being invited to contribute to the nascent field of AI for human reasoning. The ideal contributions we have in mind are those which provide something usable that serves as a helpful foundation for you or others to develop further.
The core activities we envision include:
Roadmapping — taking a potential technological application, and exploring:
What the implications would be (hence how desirable it would be)
What might be necessary from a technical standpoint
What might be necessary to drive societal adoption
What viable pathways for pursuing this technology could be
What are the key uncertainties are
Prototyping — just building things, and testing them, to discover where they can already be useful, and where the difficulties lie
We think there is a lot to be said for a living lab philosophy: "co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation of innovative ideas, scenarios, concepts and related technological artefacts in real-life use cases".
Building or running evaluations — designing benchmarks or other forms of test or metric
In AI, people are often good at getting what they can measure — so changing what can be measured could help accelerate work in beneficial directions.
We are conscious that envisioning unbuilt technology and working out how to make it real is a big challenge! You are not being asked to approach this alone:
We actively encourage collaborations or small teams among fellows.
We will organize reading and discussion groups, seminars, and office hours with FLF researchers.
Everyone will have a mentor (at FLF or a partner organization) whom they can meet with regularly in weekly 1:1s, and in some cases there may be an opportunity for extended collaboration with a mentor.
We expect between an hour and three hours of dedicated mentor/program time a week.
At the end of the 12-week fellowship, there will be an opportunity to present your work at a “demo day”. We are keen to see good projects continue and come to life in the world, whether funded by FLF, starting life as a new organization, or adopted by an existing organization. Our hope is that the demo day will (1) provide a forcing function on fellows to get their work into a good shape, and (2) facilitate connections between projects and organizations or funders who may wish to support these.
Who are we looking for?
The ideal candidate:
Cares deeply about ensuring that humanity handles AI wisely
Is a sharp thinker and a good communicator
Has a drive to make things happen
Has experience with one or more relevant domains. This might look like experience in ML or HCI research, building useful tools for thought, or running engineering teams or startups. For the right person, there are no formal qualifications needed.
Overall, we are looking for exceptional people who might play a key role in the founding team of new projects. We think that AI progress is sufficiently fast that many people should be rethinking their plans and exploring building tech that differentially empowers humans.
We will prefer to admit fellows as part of a full-time cohort — we think that having a group of peers to discuss ideas with and potentially collaborate with is a significant advantage. We are open to making offers that do not sync with the cohort timing and/or involve part-time participation.
Our first cohort is planned to run sometime from late June or mid-July through September. This cohort is likely to include both in-person and remote participants (we cannot sponsor US visas for this program).
What will we provide?
For fellows joining as part of a cohort, an initial expenses-paid retreat
A mentor for regular meetings
Office space in the Bay Area for those able to join in person
A compute budget of $5,000 for (optional) experiments
And opportunity to apply for increases to this budget if the project necessitates it
A stipend for the 12-week fellowship:
This will typically be between $25,000 (for more junior fellows) and $50,000 (more senior professionals) for the duration of the fellowship.
Reach out to us at fellowship@flf.org (subject line: Fellowship in AI for Human Reasoning)