Last week, American billionaire Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Tesla and SpaceX, distributed the sum of 7 million dollars between 37 research teams to enable them to develop projects aimed at “avoiding” artificial intelligence “pitfalls”. Teams from prestigious universities such as Berkeley, Stanford and even Oxford are amongst the beneficiaries.
Among the projects selected, some are aimed at “ensuring that the interest in superintelligent systems remains aligned with human values” whilst others want “AI to incorporate human preferences and be capable of explaining human decisions”.
Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute, is working on “the potential risks of developing artificial intelligence on a human scale” and at “alleviating existential risks faced by humanity”.
In January, he received a 10 million dollar (i.e. 9 million Euros) donation from Elon Musk. He went on to explain that, “There is this race going on between the growing power of the technology and the growing wisdom with which we manage it”.
“So far, all of the investments have been about making the systems more intelligent. This is the first time there’s been an investment in the other”.
Le Monde (06/07/2015)