Biographical profile of AI risk philanthropist Jaan Tallinn with anecdotal event description

Jaan Tallinn grew up in Estonia, becoming one of its few computer game developers, when that nation was still a Soviet Socialist Republic. Here he compares the dissidents who brought down the Iron Curtain to the dissidents who are sounding the alarm about rapid advances in artificial intelligence. He locates the roots of the current AI dissidence, paradoxically, among such pioneers of the AI field as Wiener, Alan Turing, and I. J. Good. Jaan’s preoccupation is with existential risk, AI being among the most extreme of many. In 2012, he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk—an interdisciplinary research institute that works to mitigate risks “associated with emerging technologies and human activity” —at the University of Cambridge, along with Philosopher Huw Price and Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. He once described himself to me as “a convinced consequentialist” —convinced enough to have given away much of his entrepreneurial wealth to the Future of Life Institute (of which he is a co-founder), the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and other such organizations working on risk reduction. Max Tegmark has written about him: “Tf you’re an intelligent life-form reading this text millions of years from now and marveling at how life is flourishing, you may owe your existence to Jaan.” On a recent visit to London, Jaan and I participated on an AI panel for the Serpentine Gallery’s Marathon at London’s City Hall, under the aegis of Hans Ulrich Obrist (another contributor to this volume). This being the art world, there was a glamorous dinner party that night in a mansion filled with London’s beautiful people— artists, fashion models, oligarchs, stars of stage and screen. After working the room in his unaffected manner (“Hi, I’m Jaan”), he suddenly said, “Time for hip-hop dancing,” dropped to the floor on one hand, and began demonstrating his spectacular moves to the bemused A-listers. Then off he went into the dance-club subculture, which is apparently how he ends every evening when he’s on the road. Who knew? 69 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016289