Thinking deeply about the ethical and practical questions that attend AI development is very important, but not because we’ll dream up some guidelines to permanently steer our descendants. The long-term challenges and opportunities will be far different than the ones we now know, and the people of tomorrow can’t be fenced in by our reality, even if we’re making good decisions in the present. We can only hope that our example of trying to apply ethics to machine intelligence will inspire future citizens do the same in their time. The tradition, more than the particulars, is what’s most important. 

In a Wall Street Journal article, Amir Mizroch writes of Cambridge establishing the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence to be led by Professor Huw Price. An excerpt:

In an interview, Price said part of the job would be to create an AI community with a common purpose of responsible innovation, and to update the current thinking about the opportunities and challenges posed by AI.

“Using memes from science fiction movies made decades ago –the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey — that was 50 years ago. Stanley Kubrick was a brilliant film director but we can do better than that now,” he said. The classic film features a sentient computer program called HAL-9000 on board a space ship. The computer kills the ship’s crew.

The new center will also collaborate with the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. A major focus of the collaboration would be around what Price called “the value alignment program,” where software programmers would team up with ethicists and philosophers on trying to write code that would govern the behavior of artificial intelligence programs.

“As a species, we need a successful transition to an era in which we share the planet with high-level, non-biological intelligence,” Price said. “We don’t know how far away that is, but we can be pretty confident that it’s in our future. Our challenge is to make sure that goes well.”

The new center in Cambridge joins others around the world set up recently to study the consequences of intelligent machines.•