Timeline of Future of Humanity Institute

This is a timeline of the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI).

Sample questions
This is an experimental section that provides some sample questions for readers, similar to reading questions that might come with a book. Some readers of this timeline might come to the page aimlessly and might not have a good idea of what they want to get out of the page. Having some "interesting" questions can help in reading the page with more purpose and in getting a sense of why the timeline is an important tool to have.

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:


 * What was FHI up to for the first ten years of its existence (roughly up to the time when Superintelligence was published)? (Scan the years 2005–2014.)
 * What are the websites FHI has been associated with? (Sort by the "Event type" column and look at the rows labeled "Website".)
 * Who were some of the early research staff at FHI? (Sort by the "Event type" column and look at the first several rows labeled "Staff".)

Many questions are still difficult or impossible to answer just by reading the current version of this timeline. See Representativeness of events in timelines for more information.

Wikipedia pageviews for FHI page
The following plots pageviews for the Wikipedia page. The image generated on Wikipedia Views.



Wikipedia pageviews for Nick Bostrom page
The following plots pageviews for the Wikipedia page. The image is generated on Wikipedia Views.



Full timeline
Here are the inclusion criteria for various event types:


 * For "Publication", the intention is to include the most notable publications. This usually means that if a publication has been featured by FHI itself or has been discussed by some outside sources, it is included. There are too many publications to include all of them.
 * For "Website", the intention is to include all websites associated with FHI. There are not that many such websites, so this is doable.
 * For "Staff", the intention is to include all Research Fellows and leadership positions (so far, Nick Bostrom has been the only director so not much to record here).
 * For "Workshop" and "Conference", the intention is to include all events organized or hosted by FHI, but not events where FHI staff only attended or only helped with organizing.
 * For "Internal review", the intention is to include all annual review documents.
 * For "External review", the intention is to include all reviews that seem substantive (judged by intuition). For mainstream media articles, only ones that treat FHI/Bostrom at length are included.
 * For "Financial", the intention is to include all substantial (say, over $10,000) donations, including aggregated donations and donations of unknown amounts.
 * For "Nick Bostrom", the intention is to include events sufficient to give a rough overview of Bostrom's development prior to the founding of FHI.
 * For "Social media", the intention is to include all social media account creations (where the date is known) and Reddit AMAs.
 * Events about FHI staff giving policy advice (to e.g. government bodies) are not included, as there are many such events and it is difficult to tell which ones are more important.

How the timeline was built
The initial version of the timeline was written by Issa Rice.

See the commit history on GitHub for a more detailed revision history.

is available.

Feedback and comments
Feedback for the timeline can be provided at the following places:


 * LessWrong 2.0
 * Timelines Wiki Facebook group

What the timeline is still missing

 * "Sean is currently working overtime to cover a missing administrative staff member, but he plans to release a new achievement report (see sidebar on this page for past achievement reports) sometime in the next few months." However, the last "Achievements Report" I can find ends in 2010.
 * i'm curious what output is associated with "Applied epistemology" research agenda https://web.archive.org/web/20130116011525/http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/rationality_and_wisdom
 * when did FHI start doing more ML-based stuff? was it after it hired owain evans?
 * "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox"; discussion on HN  and reddit (and probably other places)

Timeline update strategy

 * FHI posts new quarterly updates here: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reporting/
 * FHI posts more granular announcements at https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/news/