How Britain’s oldest universities are trying to protect humanity from risky A.I.
- The University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute is led by Professor Nick Bostrom, who is the author of “Superintelligence.”
- Over at the University of Cambridge, just 66 miles away, there is the Center for the Study of Existential Risk and the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence.
- Researchers at both universities are carefully studying how to ensure artificial intelligence is developed safely.
In the main foyer of the institute, complex equations beyond most people’s comprehension are scribbled on whiteboards next to words like “AI safety” and “AI governance.” Pensive students from other departments pop in and out as they go about daily routines.
It’s rare to get an interview with Bostrom, a transhumanist who believes that we can and should augment our bodies with technology to help eliminate ageing as a cause of death.
“I’m quite protective about research and thinking time so I’m kind of semi-allergic to scheduling too many meetings,” he says.
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Bostrom’s institute has been backed with roughly $20 million since its inception. Around $14 million of that coming from the Open Philanthropy Project, a San Francisco-headquartered research and grant-making foundation. The rest of the money has come from the likes of Musk and the European Research Council.
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The idea for CSER was conceived in the summer of 2011 during a conversation in the back of a Copenhagen cab between Cambridge academic Huw Price and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, whose donations account for 7-8% of the center’s overall funding and equate to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“I shared a taxi with a man who thought his chance of dying in an artificial intelligence-related accident was as high as that of heart disease or cancer,” Price wrote of his taxi ride with Tallinn. “I’d never met anyone who regarded it as such a pressing cause for concern — let alone anyone with their feet so firmly on the ground in the software business.”
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The Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) was opened at Cambridge in 2016 and today it sits in the same building as CSER, a stone’s throw from the punting boats on the River Cam. The building isn’t the only thing the centers share — staff overlap too and there’s a lot of research that spans both departments.
Backed with over £10 million from the grant-making Leverhulme Foundation, the center is designed to support “innovative blue skies thinking,” according to ÓhÉigeartaigh, its co-developer.
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See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/25/oxford-cambridge-ai.html