For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway.
Now five of the world’s largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of A.I. to humans,researchers at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon,Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of A.I. on jobs, transportation and even warfare.
Tech companies have long overpromised what artificially intelligent machines can do. In recent years, however, the A.I. field has made rapid advances in a range of areas, from self-driving cars and machines that understand speech, like Amazon’s Echo device, to a new generation of weapons systems that threaten to automate combat.
The specifics of what the industry group will do or say — even its name —have yet to be hashed out. But the basic intention is clear: to ensure thatA.I. research is focused on benefiting people, not hurting them, according to four people involved in the creation of the industry partnership who are not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The importance of the industry effort is underscored in a report issued onThursday by a Stanford University group funded by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is one of the executives in the industry discussions. The Stanford project, called the One Hundred Year Study onArtificial Intelligence, lays out a plan to produce a detailed report on the impact of A.I. on society every five years for the next century….The Stanford report attempts to define the issues that citizens of a typicalNorth American city will face in computers and robotic systems that mimic human capabilities. The authors explore eight aspects of modern life,including health care, education, entertainment and employment, but specifically do not look at the issue of warfare..(More)”