Compared with the magnitude of what could go wrong, safety and ethics research on AI is marginal. Only a handful of institutions, owing to the challenges of resources, take technical safety issues seriously. And yet safety decisions made today will alter the future course of technology and humanity. There’s a clear must-do here: encourage, incentivize, and directly fund much more work in this area. It’s time for an Apollo program on AI safety and biosafety. Hundreds of thousands should be working on it. Concretely, a good proposal for legislation would be to require that a fixed portion—say, a
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