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DeepMind, Elon Musk and others pledge not to make autonomous AI weapons
Today during the Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Future of Life Institute announced that more than 2,400 individuals and 160 companies and organizations have signed a pledge, declaring that they will "neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of lethal autonomous weapons." The signatories, representing 90 countries, also call on governments to pass laws against such weapons. Google DeepMind and the Xprize Foundation are among the groups who've signed on while Elon Musk and DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman have made the pledge as well.
Elon Musk urges the UN to limit AI weapons
Elon Musk has signed his name alongside more than 100 others to ask the UN to regulate the use of autonomous weapons systems. The group of concerned engineers, many of whom are respected in the field of AI, is asking the global body to "protect civilians" from "misuse" of AI-driven weapons. They believe that smart, self-guided kill bots would become the tool of choice for despots and tyrants.
Elon Musk-backed project grants $7 million to AI researchers
After Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute (FLI) to finance studies aiming to keep AIs safe and beneficial (i.e., prevent them from going down Skynet's path) almost 300 teams submitted their research proposals. Now, the institute is finally done reviewing them all and has decided to grant $7 million from Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project to 37 projects over the next three years. Some of the studies want to teach AI what humans prefer based on body language, one aims to develop a system that can explain its decision to humans, while another vows to figure out how to make sure robots and other intelligent weapons are always kept under human control.
