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LinkedIn's and eBay's Founders Are Donating $20 Million To Protect Us From AI (recode.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the better-safe-than-sorry dept.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, have each committed $10 million to fund academic research and development aimed at keeping artificial intelligence systems ethical and to prevent building AI that may harm society. Recode reports: The fund received an additional $5 million from the Knight Foundation and two other $1 million donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Jim Pallotta, founder of the Raptor Group. The $27 million reserve is being anchored by MIT's Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, the name of the fund, expects to grow as new funders continue to come on board. AI systems work by analyzing massive amounts of data, which is first profiled and categorized by humans, with all their prejudices and biases in tow. The money will pay for research to investigate how socially responsible artificially intelligent systems can be designed to, say, keep computer programs that are used to make decisions in fields like education, transportation and criminal justice accountable and fair. The group also hopes to explore ways to talk with the public about and foster understanding of the complexities of artificial intelligence. The two universities will form a governing body along with Hoffman and the Omidyar Network to distribute the funds. The $20 million from Hoffman and the Omidyar Network are being given as a philanthropic grant -- not an investment vehicle.

15 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Al who? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Al Gore? Weird Al?

    1. Re: Al who? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Abraham LinkedIn?

    2. Re: Al who? by LifesABeach · · Score: 2

      I wonder if I could apply for a grant to stub out an AI that would be 3 Laws Safe? It's not an original idea, but it is not trivial either.

  2. The stupid things you can read about sometimes.. by MindPrison · · Score: 2

    ...sometimes it makes me wonder why I keep reading this stuff, and even more so why I respond?

    I mean c'mon...someone "insert ceo/founder/idealist/rich-moron etc. here" donates money to keep A.I. civilized. Yay. As if that is gonna be a deciding factor, as if that is going to do anything. I smell tax excemptions here...

    --
    What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
  3. Linkedin ethics? by Matt_Bennett · · Score: 2

    So... the AI will have all the ethics of linkedin... the freedom to spam every person you've ever contacted, ever?

    1. Re:Linkedin ethics? by Nutria · · Score: 2

      Only if you're stupid enough to give them access to your email address book.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  4. No way by fyngyrz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's no way to make AI safe, for exactly the same reasons there's no way to make a human safe.

    If we create intelligences, they will be... intelligent. They will respond to the stimulus they receive.

    Perhaps the most important thing we can prepare for is to be polite and kind to them. The same way we'd be polite and kind of a big bruiser with a gun. Might start by practicing on each other, for that matter. Wouldn't hurt.

    If we treat AI, when it arrives (certainly hasn't yet... not even close), like we do people... then "safe" is out of the question.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  5. Will probably run into the same problem as people by Solandri · · Score: 2

    Any AI designed to act ethically has a limited set of options available to it relative to an AI designed to act unethically (or rather, not designed to take ethics into account). The ethical AI will just be killed/taken over by the unethical AI. That's how it is for people. The only reason ethical societies manage to exist is because ethical people outnumber unethical people, and are willing to band together and temporarily put aside their ethical code long enough to fight and defeat unethical people. (e.g. Imprisoning innocents is considered inhumane, but we have no problem imprisoning convicted criminals.)

    I suspect the solution here isn't to design an AI to act ethically, but to design it to act as the AI or person it's dealing with acts. Basically the tit for tat strategy as a solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma. That gives it enough leeway to protect itself, while also creating an incentive for other AIs / people to act ethically.

  6. Isaac Asimov solved this decades ago by blahbooboo · · Score: 3

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

            A robot [AI] may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
            A robot [AI] must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
            A robot [AI] must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.[1]

    1. Re:Isaac Asimov solved this decades ago by blahbooboo · · Score: 3

      Anyone who seriously quotes the "Three Laws", a plot device that FAILED in every story it was used in, is telling the world they are a fucking moron.

      Give a robot a box and tell it to walk into that large crowd. Does it break the three dumb laws? Nope. Oh shit there was a bomb in it now everyone is dead, thanks to that robot.

      That is a very basic example of a workaround. A real AI cold come up with a seemingly endless amount of workarounds to anything we program.

      No need to be rude in your response. I feel sorry for you to be such an angry person, you must be very unhappy in your life. People are so tough over the internet while safe behind their keyboards to act in ways they would never in person.

      You obviously never read any of the books. While I am sure you will never read my response, the Wiki page writes up this fact as Asimov used this ery weakness as the focal point of several books:

      "In The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley points out that the Laws had been deliberately misrepresented because robots could unknowingly break any of them. He restated the first law as "A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm." This change in wording makes it clear that robots can become the tools of murder, provided they not be aware of the nature of their tasks; for instance being ordered to add something to a person's food, not knowing that it is poison. Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could divide a task among multiple robots so that no individual robot could recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human being.[34] The Naked Sun complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria's millions of robots meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet.

      Baley furthermore proposes that the Solarians may one day use robots for military purposes. If a spacecraft was built with a positronic brain and carried neither humans nor the life-support systems to sustain them, then the ship's robotic intelligence could naturally assume that all other spacecraft were robotic beings. Such a ship could operate more responsively and flexibly than one crewed by humans, could be armed more heavily and its robotic brain equipped to slaughter humans of whose existence it is totally ignorant.[35] This possibility is referenced in Foundation and Earth where it is discovered that the Solarians possess a strong police force of unspecified size that has been programmed to identify only the Solarian race as human."

    2. Re:Isaac Asimov solved this decades ago by blahbooboo · · Score: 2

      Exactly, that is what was so fun about the books. They really were really mysteries set in the future (like most of the best science fiction). I actually forgot as its been many many years since i read them, that the key point was the breakdown of the laws, and the subsequent modifications to try to make them work. Really fun reading. I actually read all the books set in this "universe" he wrote. Truly amazing books considering they span decades of his life...

  7. Re:The only way to make AIs safe.. by ffkom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Self replication and a desire for continued existence are the only thing that might motivate AIs to wipe us out" - not quite!
    The most likely reason for an AI to kill you is that its designer/operator/owner/cracker instructed it to do so. And believe me, there are people who want to see you dead, no matter who you are or what you do. Once AIs are capable enough to autonomously control an armed combat robot unit, such units will be build, with the usual reasoning that it's just for our safety and because "it's controlled by us, and we are the good ones". And then one day somebody will decide to have it go against you. Might be even an accident/misunderstanding/prank.

  8. Roko's Basilisk... by Chysn · · Score: 2

    ...is really gonna have it in for those guys.

    --
    --I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
    -- See?
  9. $20 m by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

    Hopefully that covers AI ethics in China and Russia as well (otherwise, it's useless).

    --
    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  10. Natrual Selection for people and AIs by aberglas · · Score: 2

    Almost correct.

    People behave ethically because they need to work together. And people that are (too) unethical are ostracized. Unethical societies tend to collapse, and so are dominated by ethical ones. So Natural Selection has given us our moral values, which compete with shallow self interest to an extent that works out surprisingly well in our radically new society.

    Natural Selection will and does affect AIs, even before they become intelligent enough to understand the concept. (People only understood it very recently.) The difference is that AIs are not limited to the computational power of a single brain. So they do not have to cooperate with others in the way that people do. So Natural Selection will select for different ethical values for them.

    In the short term trying to make computers ethical (in our sense) is a fine goal. But in the longer term Natural Selection will define the ethics of ever more intelligent AIs.

    See the following for details

    http://www.computersthink.com/

    It amazes me that most people have not tweaked to this. But most people do not *really* understand Natural Selection. (Darwin did, and was careful not to dwell on it.)