Elon Musk Aims to Save the World from Evil AI
Elon Musk donates $10m to keep artificial intelligence good for humanity
The Future of Life Institute has announced it will use a $10m (£6m) donation from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to fund 37 research projects dedicated to keeping AI "beneficial".
The projects include $136,000 for a study of artificial intelligence weapons and how to keep them under "meaningful human control". There is also a further $1.5m earmarked for an AI research centre. Additional funding has come from the Open Philanthropy Project and, the Centre will be administered in the UK by Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
"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 centre 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."
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Prof Stephen Hawking are among the high profile figures warning about the potential dangers of AI, as robots become increasingly intelligent and less dependent on human control.
FLI president Max Tegmark pointed out that the organisation was not concerned about the nightmare scenarios posed by Hollywood films such as Terminator. "The danger with the Terminator scenario isn't that it will happen, but that it distracts from the real issues posed by future AI", he said.
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