With the U.S. pulling out of the Iran deal and canceling (and potentially un-canceling) the summit with North Korea, nuclear weapons have been front and center in the news this month. But will these disagreements lead to a world with even more nuclear weapons? And how did the recent nuclear situations with North Korea […]
From improving medicine to better search engines to assistants that help ease busy schedules, artificial intelligence is already proving a boon to society. But just as it can be designed to help, it can be designed to harm and even to kill. Military uses of AI can also run the gamut from programs that could […]
What are the odds of a nuclear war happening this century? And how close have we been to nuclear war in the past? Few academics focus on the probability of nuclear war, but many leading voices like former US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, argue that the threat of nuclear conflict is growing. On […]
UPDATE 4-9-18: The boycott against KAIST has ended. The press release for the ending of the boycott explained: “More than 50 of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics researchers from 30 different countries have declared they would end a boycott of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea’s top […]
Is the malicious use of artificial intelligence inevitable? If the history of technological progress has taught us anything, it’s that every “beneficial” technological breakthrough can be used to cause harm. How can we keep bad actors from using otherwise beneficial AI technology to hurt others? How can we ensure that AI technology is designed […]
What does it mean to create beneficial artificial intelligence? How can we expect to align AIs with human values if humans can’t even agree on what we value? Building safe and beneficial AI involves tricky technical research problems, but it also requires input from philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists on these fundamental questions. How can we […]
AlphaZero, progress in meta-learning, the role of AI in fake news, the difficulty of developing fair machine learning — 2017 was another year of big breakthroughs and big challenges for AI researchers! To discuss this more, we invited FLI’s Richard Mallah and Chelsea Finn from UC Berkeley to join Ariel for this month’s podcast. They […]
Shared Benefit Principle: AI technologies should benefit and empower as many people as possible. Today, the combined wealth of the eight richest people in the world is greater than that of the poorest half of the global population. That is, 8 people have more than the combined wealth of 3,600,000,000 others. This is already an […]
Research Goal: The goal of AI research should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence. It’s no coincidence that the first Asilomar Principle is about research. On the face of it, the Research Goal Principle may not seem as glamorous or exciting as some of the other Principles that more directly address how […]
For most of us, 2017 has been a roller coaster, from increased nuclear threats to incredible advancements in AI to crazy news cycles. But while it’s easy to be discouraged by various news stories, we at FLI find ourselves hopeful that we can still create a bright future. In this episode, the FLI team discusses […]
Click here to see this page in other languages: Russian Human Control: Humans should choose how and whether to delegate decisions to AI systems, to accomplish human-chosen objectives. When is it okay to let a machine make a decision instead of a person? Most of us allow Google Maps to choose the best route to a […]
What does it means for technology to “get it right,” and why do tech companies ignore long-term risks in their research? How can we balance near-term and long-term AI risks? And as tech companies become increasingly powerful, how can we ensure that the public has a say in determining our collective future? To discuss how […]
We’ve accomplished a lot. FLI has only been around for a few years, but during that time, we’ve: Helped mainstream AI safety research, Funded 37 AI safety research grants, Launched multiple open letters that have brought scientists and the public together for the common cause of a beneficial future, Drafted the 23 Asilomar Principles which […]
The following policy memo was written and posted by the Stanley Foundation. Download the PDF (252K) How might a nuclear crisis play out in today’s media environment? What dynamics in this information ecosystem—with social media increasing the velocity and reach of information, disrupting journalistic models, creating potent vectors for disinformation, and changing how political leaders […]
As technically challenging as it may be to develop safe and beneficial AI, this challenge also raises some thorny questions regarding ethics and morality, which are just as important to address before AI is too advanced. How do we teach machines to be moral when people can’t even agree on what moral behavior is? And […]
We at FLI offer an excited congratulations to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), this year’s winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. We could not be more honored to have had the opportunity to work with ICAN during their campaign to ban nuclear weapons. Over 70 years have passed since the bombs were […]
If you want to improve the world as much as possible, what should you do with your career? Should you become a doctor, an engineer or a politician? Should you try to end global poverty, climate change, or international conflict? These are the questions that the research group, 80,000 Hours, tries to answer. To learn […]
Click here to see this page in other languages: Russian Earlier this month, the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) released three new papers that assess global catastrophic and existential biosecurity risks and offer a cost-benefit analysis of various approaches to dealing with these risks. The work – done by Piers Millett, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Sebastian Farquhar, […]