New Research Center to Explore Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Hendricks Dewayne* <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] New Research Center to Explore Ethics of Artificial
Intelligence
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


New Research Center to Explore Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
By JOHN MARKOFF
Nov 1 2016
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/technology/new-research-
center-to-explore-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence.html>

Carnegie Mellon University plans to announce on Wednesday that it will
create a research center that focuses on the ethics of artificial
intelligence.

The ethics center, called the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and
Computational Technologies, is being established at a time of growing
international concern about the impact of A.I. technologies. That has
already led to an array of academic, governmental and private efforts to
explore a technology that until recently was largely the stuff of science
fiction.

In the last decade, faster computer chips, cheap sensors and large
collections of data have helped researchers improve on computerized tasks
like machine vision and speech recognition, as well as robotics.

Earlier this year, the White House held a series of workshops around the
country to discuss the impact of A.I., and in October the Obama
administration released a report on its possible consequences. And in
September, five large technology firms — Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and
Microsoft — created a partnership to help establish ethical guidelines for
the design and deployment of A.I. systems.

Subra Suresh, Carnegie Mellon’s president, said injecting ethical
discussions into A.I. was necessary as the technology advanced. While the
idea of “Terminator” robots still seems far-fetched, the United States
military is studying autonomous weapons that could make killing decisions
on their own — a development that war planners think would be unwise.

“We are at a unique point in time where the technology is far ahead of
society’s ability to restrain it,” Mr. Suresh noted.

But at the same time, he said some people are a bit too optimistic about
their claims of A.I. advances, particularly when it comes to autonomous
vehicles.

Mr. Suresh said he personally did not think self-driving cars would be in
widespread use in the next three years.

Last year, Carnegie Mellon drew national attention when a group of 36
technical staff members and four faculty members left to join a new
self-driving car laboratory that Uber established in Pittsburgh. The
company recently started testing self-driving cars around the city.

The Uber laboratory has been a sensitive spot for Carnegie Mellon. The
field of artificial intelligence emerged in part at Carnegie Mellon in the
1950s in the work of faculty who developed software that showed how
computer algorithms could intelligently solve problems.

University officials said the departing faculty have been replaced and 13
additional professors have been hired since the defections. They also said
that between 2011 and 2015, Carnegie Mellon faculty and staff created 164
start-up companies.

[snip]

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