The Future of Life Institute is an independent non-profit that educates and engages lawmakers, key stakeholders, and the general public about transformative technologies and their implications. We advocate for policies and approaches that mitigate catastrophic risks while advancing positive futures for humanity.
Humanity stands at a fork in the road with AI. One path races to replace humans as creators, caregivers, decision-makers, and workers—threatening our economy, security, civil liberties, democracy, and the human experience. But a better path exists: trustworthy, controllable AI tools that amplify human capability, strengthen institutions, and help us solve problems we cannot solve alone.
Our work has been featured widely, including in The Washington Post, Politico, Vox, Forbes, The Guardian, the BBC, The Economist and Wired.
Some of our achievements include:
- Superintelligence Statement, an open letter calling for a prohibition on the development of superintelligent AI until there is strong public buy-in and scientific consensus that it can be developed safely and controllably. The letter has been signed by more than 130,000 people, including Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Steve Wozniak, Richard Branson, Steve Bannon, Prince Harry and Susan Rice.
- The Asilomar AI Principles, one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles.
- The Pro-Human AI Declaration, a document with five guidelines on how AI development must be centred on humanity first, created during a meeting of bipartisan civil society groups spanning faith, labour, and think tanks.
- How would a nuclear war between Russia and the US affect you personally?- A scientifically accurate simulation showing the consequences of nuclear war, with over 6 millions views and a feature in Time Magazine.
- AI Safety Index - an objective rating of AI companies on key safety and security domains, as judged by experts in the field.
FLI is a largely virtual organization, with a team of approximately 40 distributed internationally, mostly in Europe and the US. We have four offices: Campbell in California, Brussels in Belgium, London in the UK, and Washington DC. We meet in person as a full team twice a year.