Risks of general artificial intelligence

The papers in this special volume of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence are the outcome of a conference on the ‘Impacts and Risks of Artificial General Intelligence’ (AGI-Impacts) that took place at the University of Oxford, St Anne’s College, on 10 and 11 December 2012 – jointly with the fifth annual conference on ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ (AGI-12). The conference was organised by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford: academically by Nick Bostrom and myself, with support from research fellows Stuart Armstrong, Toby Ord, Anders Sandberg and more members of the program committee; organisationally by Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, with support from Alexandre Erler, Daniel Dewey, Stuart Armstrong and others. We are grateful to the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) community for the openness to these issues of security, as shown by the fact that they initiated this connection and that the vast majority of the ca. 150 participants of the main AGI meeting also attended our AGI-Impacts event. Last but not least, we want to thank the ‘European Network for Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics’ and the organisation ‘Saving Homo Sapiens’ for sponsoring the event.