Welcome to the Future of Life Institute newsletter. Every month, we bring 42,000+ subscribers the latest news on how emerging technologies are transforming our world.

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Today's newsletter is a 10-minute read. Some of what we cover this month:

• 🗺️ FLI partners with The Elders to call for action on urgent threats.

• 🛑 The campaign to ban deepfakes - have you signed the open letter?

• 📫 FLI’s new Autonomous Weapons Newsletter.

• 💰 New funding and career opportunities!

We’re proud to announce our new partnership with The Elders, an international organization founded by Nelson Mandela to bring together former world leaders in pursuit of peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet.

As our first joint initiative, together we’ve released an open letter urging world leaders to take decisive action on the ongoing harms and existential risk presented by ungoverned AI, the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, and pandemics.

The letter, widely covered in media and already signed by 2,500+ individuals including former leaders, Nobel Laureates, scientists, activists and artists, calls upon decision-makers to adopt the principles of “long-view leadership”.

If you haven’t already, you can add your name to the letter, and share our social media posts.

A diverse and growing coalition of experts, activists, lawmakers across the political spectrum, and independent organizations, including FLI, SAG-AFTRA, Women Against Violence Europe, Control AI, and the Women’s Media Center, has formed to call for meaningful legislation to ban nonconsensual deepfakes.

The campaign and related open letter has been circulating widely since its release last week, with its call to action to prevent further harm resonating with many - signatories already include Steven Pinker, Andrew Yang, Marietje Schaake, Sneha Revanur, Chris Weitz, Stuart Russell, and many others.

However, we need your help to maximize the campaign’s reach. Learn more about the objectives of the open letter below, and join the campaign.

Our Futures program, launched in 2023 to guide humanity towards the beneficial outcomes made possible by transformative technologies, is offering two exciting new funding opportunities to support research into realizing a positive, empowered future with AI.

Details about the two Requests for Proposals:

Request for Proposals #1: For papers evaluating and predicting the impact of AI on the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relating to poverty, healthcare, energy, or climate change.

Request for Proposals #2: For designs of trustworthy global mechanisms or institutions to govern AGI in the near future.

Selected proposals will receive a $15,000 grant to support this work according to the researcher's discretion. Applications are due April 1st, 2024.

We’re excited to announce that we’re launching a new newsletter: The Autonomous Weapons Newsletter.

The Autonomous Weapons Newsletter will keep subscribers up-to-date on the autonomous weapons space, with a monthly update covering policymaking efforts, weapons systems technology, and more.

With this newsletter, we aim to provide a well-informed, objective resource for an audience primarily consisting of policymakers, journalists, and diplomats.

Subscribe and spread the word, and keep an eye out for our first edition coming mid-March!

• The EU’s new ‘AI Office’ will play a key role in AI Act implementation - it can compel Big Tech companies to evaluate their models, conduct adversarial testing, and mitigate systemic risk. The regulator will be able to access the world’s most powerful models, and can issue fines of up to 3% of global turnover for non-compliance. The Office is recruiting staff members for technical roles shortly. Applicants with legal and policy backgrounds will also be invited to apply soon. Subscribe to AI Office updates for more information.

• Following the November AI Safety Summit, the UK Government has announced a significant new investment in AI safety, directing £100 million+ of funding to support new research on responsible AI and prepare regulators to meaningfully address AI risks.

• On February 2nd, the EU AI Act was unanimously endorsed by all 27 EU nations, being formally adopted by the EU's Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER). This is yet another important milestone as the Act approaches the final legislative stages.

• The leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives are launching a 24-member bipartisan House task force to ensure safe, responsible AI innovation. FLI’s Director of U.S. Policy, Landon Klein, told Semafor this was a “very positive step” towards regulation.

• California State Senator Scott Wiener has introduced a "landmark" bill requiring tech companies to submit new AI models for safety testing before release, with great potential to influence national standards.

An emerging means of governance: A new report presents computing power as a promising tool for AI governance, allowing governments to “Track or monitor compute to gain visibility into AI development and use; Subsidize or limit access to compute to shape the allocation of resources across AI projects; [and] Monitor activity, limit access, or build ‘guardrails’ into hardware to enforce rules”.

Why this matters: As governments around the world examine how to regulate rapidly-evolving AI technology, computing power could serve an important role given, as the report’s authors note, its detectability, excludability, quantifiability, and supply chain concentration. However, this node of governance also requires careful consideration of its risks - i.e., the risks of it being “used to infringe on civil liberties, perpetuate existing power structures, and entrench authoritarian regimes”.