Elon Musk-Backed Project Grants $7 Million To Artificial Intelligence

If we aren’t prepared for the introduction of artificial intelligence, the effects for humanity could be dire.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, who counts establishing a human colony on Mars among his many goals, has been quite vocal about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Future of Life Institute, which is backed by Musk, granted $7million to teams around the world to look at the opportunities and risks posed by the development of intelligent machines.

Elon Musk backs FLI and donates $7 million to explore AI risks.

The institute announced in this week that it will be issuing grants to 37 different research teams, which have been selected from a list of around 300 applicants. These first 37 projects are the beginning of that work.

These teams will be pushed to undertake research in economics, law and computer science for the program.

One group, which is executing research on how to manage issues that might arise pointed out that their research is about people having the ability to, “manage the liability for the harms they might cause to individuals and property”.

The issues would include teaching AI to learn what humans want, aligning robots’ interests with our own, and keeping AI completely under human control.

The term Artificial Intelligence is coined by John McCarthy in 1955.

“I was also an investor in Deep Mind before Google acquired it and Vicarious”.

Since then, there’s been a push to see if artificial intelligence can eventually exceed the intelligence of humans. He’s brought upTerminator in the past while discussing his concerns about the evolution of AI and stated that AI has the potential to be “more risky than nukes”.

For now Elon Musk and the group he sponsored are trying to develop ways that allow for better engineering practices and basic ethical rules that should be used when developing “self-learning” machinery. According to Musk, this is a matter of protecting humanity from computers who are too powerful, and begin making decisions themselves, which are geared toward self-preservation, rather than human preservation. Wozniak said earlier this year that smart machines cannot only take care of use and run every aspect of our lives but they can also out-smart us and eventually get rid of us because we are obsolete.

However, Musk’s initiative is not entirely against AI technology.

Max Tegmark, President of the Boston based volunteer institute referred to the “Terminator Genisys” film that is slated to release this week.