AI Governance Course—Curriculum and Application

[Mau]

[Edit: The course has received major updates since this post was made. See here for the most recent course information and curriculum. I’ve removed the largely outdated information from this post.]

While many people are interested in transformative AI governance, there is currently no scalable introduction to the field that offers substantial breadth, depth, context, accountability, and information about relevant career opportunities. Anecdotally, finding even a few of those things can be tough. Aiming to improve this state of affairs, I’m excited to introduce the AI Governance Fundamentals program. This program seeks to efficiently bring people up to speed on issues in transformative AI governance through an 11-week virtual course. It consists of 8 weeks of readings, facilitated group discussions, speaker sessions, and a 4-week capstone project, for a total of ~2-4 hours per week.

[Kat Woods]

This is fantastic! Thank you for making this.

Would you like us to convert the readings into audio to make it easier for people to participate? This would be pretty easy on our end.

[lukeprog]

I’m not involved in this program, but I would like to see that happen. Though note that some of the readings are copyrighted.

[Mau]

Thank you! That would be great.

(I’m not sure I’d have capacity to manage hosting of the audio files, so no worries if that would be a requirement (although my sense was that it generally isn’t, with Nonlinear?))

[Kat Woods]

Fantastic! You’re right, we’d just put it into podcast form so people could listen on their podcast players, so no need to host the audio files or anything. I’ll DM you with more details.

[MichaelA🔸]

Thanks for your work on this, and thanks to all other people who helped as well! From a fairly quick look, this seems very exciting and useful, and I’ve already recommended a few people apply.

I came back to this post to try to find a link to the actual latest non-abbreviated curriculum, but wasn’t able to find that via skimming. Is this the right link? If so, maybe you should edit the post to more clearly link to that near the top? (I found it via a link in a link in one of the footnotes, so kind-of just got lucky.)

[JacktheHawk]

This sounds amazing. I would love to apply. Are you planning to do another one next year? Is there somewhere that I can be notified when the applications open up again?

[Mau]

Thanks so much! My sense is we’ll probably run this regularly (on a yearly basis or more often than that), although it feels a bit early to commit to that before we’ve seen how the current version goes.

Depending on your situation and interests, I might tentatively suggest diving in to whatever parts seem most interesting to you rather than (only) waiting for next time (since if you’re considering relevant career changes, that extra 6 months or so might be pretty impactful).

[JacktheHawk]

This is helpful, thanks! I will check out the curriculum.

[CalebW]

Thanks for organising :)

When do you expect decisions on applications will be made by?