While Elon Musk can be counted as one of a growing number of technology leaders who recognizes the dangers associated with the advancement of artificial intelligence (Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking are also included on the list), he is one of the first to actually do something about it.
The Future of Life institute has announced it will use a $10 million donation from the Tesla CEO / SpaceX founder / PayPal originator, for the purpose of funding 37 projects dedicated to keeping artificial intelligence “beneficial”.
Among these projects, a study of artificial intelligence weapons and how to keep them under “meaningful human control” will receive $136,000. Also, $1.5 million will go towards an AI research center, which will be run by Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK.
“There are reasons to believe that unregulated and unconstrained development could incur significant dangers, both from ‘bad actors’ like irresponsible governments and from the unprecedented capability of the technology itself,” said Oxford University's Nick Bostrom.
“The center will focus explicitly on the long-term impacts of AI, the strategic implications of powerful AI systems as they come to exceed human capabilities in most domains of interest, and the policy responses that could best be used to mitigate the potential risks of this technology.”
Additional projects include studies on how ethics and human values can be incorporated into AI work.
“The danger with the Terminator scenario isn't that it will happen, but that it distracts from the real issues posed by future AI”, said Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute. “We're staying focused, and the 37 teams supported by today's grants should help solve such real issues.”
Musk’s donation to the Institute was actually made in January—the following months were spent determining how best to allocate the funds. “Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important”, he said at the time. “I agree with them, so I'm committing $10m to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity.”
Via BBC
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