By STEPHANIE MLOT,
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others have joined forces to demonstrate how AI benefits society.
In 2014, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk likened artificial intelligence to “summoning the demon.” Several months later, Bill Gates expressed concerns about developing “super intelligence.”
But despite fears of self-aware robots enslaving the human race, work in AI continues apace. Google’s DeepMind is using AI to reduce power consomption, car makers like Ford and Toyota are investing in AI for self-driving cars, and the digital personal assistants on your phone grow more powerful by the day.
In a bid to perhaps assuage fears and battle misconceptions, six tech titans are joining forces for a new supergroup nonprofit, dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. While that name alone might conjure images of a shadowy group of villains plotting your demise in a sky-high tower, Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft insist their organization just wants to “maximize [the] potential [of AI] and ensure it benefits as many people as possible.”
Co-chaired by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and Microsoft Technical Fellow Eric Horvitz, the organization intends to conduct research on and recommend best practices in ethics, transparency, privacy, and collaboration. Academics, nonprofits, and specialists in policy and ethics will also be invited to join the project.
“We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people’s lives and can be leverages to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequity, health, and education,” the project website says.
Early partnerships include the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2); additional participants will be announced in the future.
One thing likely not on the agenda? Killer robots. In July, Steve Wozniak, alongside professor Stephen Hawking, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, professor Noam Chomsky, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis warned against the use of autonomous weapons systems.