Somehow MIRI’s mission comes in at #10 on this list of 10 responses to the technological unemployment problem.

I suppose technically, Friendly AI is a solution for all the things. 🙂

This reminds me of the first draft of MIRI’s environmental policy, which read:

[MIRI] exists to ensure that the creation of smarter than human intelligence benefits society. Because societies depend on their environment to thrive, one implication of our core mission is a drive to ensure that when advanced intelligence technologies become available, they are used to secure the continued viability and resilience of the environment.

Many advanced artificial intelligences (AIs) will have instrumental goals to capture as many resources as possible for their own use, because resources are useful for a broad range of possible AI goals. To ensure that Earth’s resources are used wisely despite the creation of advanced AIs, we must discover how to design these AIs so that they can be given final goals which accord with humane values.

Though poorly designed AIs may pose a risk to the resources and environment on which humanity depends, more carefully designed AIs may be our best solution to long-term environmental concerns. To whatever extent we have goals for environmental sustainability, they are goals that can be accomplished to greater degrees using sufficiently advanced intelligence.

To prevent environmental disasters caused by poorly designed AIs, and to ensure that we one day have the intelligence needed to solve our current environmental dilemmas, [MIRI] is committed to discovering the principles of safe, beneficial AI that will one day allow us all to safeguard our environment as well as our future.

In the end, though, we decided to go with a more conventional (super-boring) environmental policy, available here.