Who We Are

We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization dedicated to anticipating societal-scale risks from transformative artificial intelligence (AI), with a unique focus on leveraging foresight and forecasting methods for practical planning purposes.

What Are Societal-Scale Risks?

Societal-scale risks may be distinguished from individual-level risks, which impact a single person, system-level risks, such as those that affect global banking system, and existential-level risks, implying widely catastrophic or even extinction-level outcomes. Societal-scale risks involve many individuals and systems interacting together. These interactions can cause a ripple effect, where harm to one aspect of society may ripple across others, putting the whole societal structure at risk of negative outcomes. These risks tend to be immediate- or short-term risks rather than long-term. Examples of societal-scale risks in the AI domain could include the centralization of economic power, knowledge deterioration, or failures in safety-critical systems while examples in other domains could include pandemics and nuclear war. However, AI systems could degrade trust in nuclear deterrence and destabilize the offense-defense balance, with complex societal-scale implications.  

What Is Foresight and Forecasting?

Both forecasting and foresight involve looking ahead into an unknowable future. Forecasting simply tries to make hard predictions about what will happen given some data and a timeline. This is already well-established in AI and has proven useful. Foresight, on the other hand, accounts for a range of possible outcomes, is focused on scenario-building and strategic planning. TFI utilizes aspects of each in its work, for example, to create reasonable benchmarks for capabilities progress, to identify pertinent questions, and to refine elicitation methodologies. TFI is the only AI safety research organization with an explicit focus on foresight and forecasting.