The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford closed earlier this week.

The FHI was an interdisciplinary research group founded in 2005 by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who served as its director for its entire existence. He will now be leaving Oxford.

The closure of the FHI appears to be the result of decisions by Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. A statement on the FHI website says:

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home). 

A “final report” on the FHI by Anders Sandberg provides a little more detail:

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 reasons the Faculty of Philosophy told the FHI to stop hiring and fundraising have not been made public. It’s not clear whether it is related to personnel or administrative issues, shifts in funding priorities, dissatisfaction with the research focus of the FHI, or something else altogether. (Please avoid speculation about this in the comments.)

The website statement summarizes that research focus:

FHI was involved in the germination of a wide range of ideas including existential risk, effective altruism, longtermism, AI alignment, AI governance, global catastrophic risk, grand futures, information hazards, the unilateralist’s curse, and moral uncertainty. It also did significant work on anthropics, human enhancement ethics, systemic risk modeling, forecasting and prediction markets, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and on the attributes and strategic implications of key future technologies. One major contribution was in showing that it was even possible to do rigorous research on big picture questions about humanity’s future.

The report goes into greater detail on this research and its impact, as well as the various academic and public-facing activities of scholars at the FHI. You can read it here.

UPDATE (4/18/24): An inquiry to parties at the University of Oxford outside the FHI yielded the following statement:

Oxford University has taken the difficult decision to close the Future of Humanity Institute, a research centre in the Faculty of Philosophy. The Institute has made an important contribution to the study of the future of humanity, for which we would like to thank and recognise the research team. Researchers elsewhere across Oxford University are likely to continue to work on this emerging field.

While this confirms some facts, it doesn’t do much to explain the reasons for the closure. Some insight into those reasons, perhaps, can be gleaned from a section towards the end of FHI’s report:

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.

Another important lesson (which is well known in business and management everywhere outside academia) is that as an organization scales up it needs to organize itself differently. The early informal structure cannot be maintained beyond a certain size, and must be gradually replaced with an internal structure. Doing this gracefully, without causing administrative sclerosis or lack of delegation, is tricky and in my opinion we somewhat failed. 

The post The End of the Future of Humanity Institute (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.