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Five of tech’s biggest players — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM — are teaming up “to benefit people and society” through artificial intelligence with a new non-profit partnership announced Wednesday.
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The Partnership on AI will consult both corporate and non-corporate actors equally to discuss questions on ethics, fairness and inclusivity and will make all meetings public, according to its website.
The members — all of which are well on their way to developing various AI technologies — said they believe in the potential of AI to better the world.
“We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people’s lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education,” said the partnership’s website.
Among the developments currently explored by these companies, however, are military technologies – some with direct contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense – and automation, which can result in millions of job losses.
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Prominent techies have already cautioned about AI, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. Elon Musk called it “our greatest existential threat.”
Musk said that he invested in DeepMind – Google’s AI branch that is co-leading the partnership – to ostensibly keep an eye on it, stating that "Unless you have direct exposure to groups like DeepMind, you have no idea how fast it is growing at a pace close to exponential."
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He retweeted a video on how AI might be able to access supercomputers and wrote in a comment, later deleted, that “something seriously dangerous” could happen as soon as in the next five years.
Public suspicion over the dangers of AI have amounted to an "echo chamber of anxiety," said the partnership’s co-chair Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher, in a conference call with the media. In order to calm down these anxieties — referring mostly to algorithm bias and apocalyptic scenarios commonly portrayed by Hollywood — the partnership would educate the public and receive feedback on what AI really means while reassuring people that they won’t exploit their powers with non-enforceable tenets that each member committed to respecting.
The clearest rule on not abusing their information reads, "Opposing development and use of AI technologies that would violate international conventions on human rights, and promoting safeguards and technologies that do no harm."
Beyond that, the group is still unclear about how it would self-regulate, who it would and wouldn't invite — including other players like Apple and Twitter — and whether it would share data between members.
Even governmental relations are up in the air, stating only that it “does not intend to lobby government.”
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