The Future of Humanity Institute could make use of your money

Many people have an incorrect view of the Future of Humanity Institute’s funding situation, so this is a brief note to correct that; think of it as a spiritual successor to this post. As John Maxwell puts it, FHI is “one of the three organizations co-sponsoring LW [and] a group within the University of Oxford’s philosophy department that tackles important, large-scale problems for humanity like how to go about reducing existential risk.” (If you’re not familiar with our work, this article is a nice, readable introduction, and our director, Nick Bostrom, wrote Superintelligence.) Though we are a research institute in an ancient and venerable institution, this does not guarantee funding or long-term stability.

Academic research is generally funded through grants, but because the FHI is researching important but unusual problems, and because this research is multi-disciplinary, we’ve found it difficult to attract funding from the usual grant bodies. This has meant that we’ve had to prioritise a certain number of projects that are not perfect for existential risk reduction, but that allow us to attract funding from interested institutions.
With more assets, we could both liberate our long-term researchers to do more “pure Xrisk” research, and hire or commission new experts when needed to look into particular issues (such as synthetic biology, the future of politics, and the likelihood of recovery after a civilization collapse).
We are not in any immediate funding crunch, nor are we arguing that the FHI would be a better donation target than MIRI, CSER, or the FLI. But any donations would be both gratefully received and put to effective use. If you’d like to, you can donate to FHI here. Thank you!