The Future of Life Institute has published their document Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence and written an open letter for people to sign indicating their support.
Success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity, and it is therefore worthwhile to research how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This document gives numerous examples (which should by no means be construed as an exhaustive list) of such worthwhile research aimed at ensuring that AI remains robust and beneficial.
A number of prestigious people from AI and other fields have signed the open letter, including Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig, Eric Horvitz, Ilya Sutskever, several DeepMind folks, Murray Shanahan, Erik Brynjolfsson, Margaret Boden, Martin Rees, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others. I'd edit that into the OP.
Also, it's worth noting that the research priorities document cites a number of MIRI's papers.