Co-founder, Skype:: co-founder future of life 1000+ signatories - technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before, or to self-destruct. lets make a difference
JAAN TALLINN
Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa. He is a founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and philanthropically supports other existential risk research organizations such as the Future of Humanity Institute, the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He has also served on the Estonian President’s Academic Advisory Board.
We have technology to thank for all the ways in which today is better than the stone age, and technology is likely to keep improving at an accelerating pace. We are a charity and outreach organization working to ensure that tomorrow’s most powerful technologies are beneficial for humanity. With less powerful technologies such as fire, we learned to minimize risks largely by learning from mistakes. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, planning ahead is a better strategy than learning from mistakes, so we support research and other efforts aimed at avoiding problems in the first place.
We are currently focusing on keeping artificial intelligence beneficial and we are also exploring ways of reducing risks from nuclear weapons and biotechnology. FLI is based in the Boston area, and welcomes the participation of scientists, students, philanthropists, and others nearby and around the world. Here is a video highlighting our activities from our first year.
beneficial ai conference
BENEFICIAL AI 2017
In our sequel to the 2015 Puerto Rico AI conference, we brought together an amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, and thought leaders in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI. We hosted a two-day workshop for our grant recipients to give them an opportunity to highlight and discuss the progress with their grants. We followed that with a 2.5-day conference, in which people from various AI-related fields hashed out opportunities and challenges related to the future of AI and steps we can take to ensure that the technology is beneficial. Honoring the FrieNDA for the conference, we are only posting videos and slides below with approval of the speaker. Learn more about the Asilomar AI Principles that resulted from the conference, the process involved in developing them, and the resulting discussion about each principle. (It looks like we’ll be posting almost everything, but please be patient while we finish editing and uploading videos, etc.)
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Thursday January 5
All afternoon: registration open; come chill & meet old and new friends!
1800-2100: Welcome reception
Friday January 6
0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Opening keynotes on AI, economics & law: Progress since Puerto Rico 2015
- Welcome Remarks by Max Tegmark (video)
- Talks:
- Group photo
1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1500: Breakout sessions
1500-1800: Economics: How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose?
- Talk: Daniela Rus (MIT) (video)
- Panel with Daniela Rus (MIT), Andrew Ng (Baidu), Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind), Moshe Vardi (Rice) & Peter Norvig (Google): How AI is automating and augmenting work (video)
- Talks:
- Panel with Andrew McAfee (MIT), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia), Eric Schmidt (Google) & Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn): Implications of AI for the Economy and Society (video)
- Fireside chat with Daniel Kahneman: What makes people happy? (video)
1800-2100: Dinner
Saturday January 7
0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Creating human-level AI: Will it happen, and if so, when and how? What key remaining obstacles can be identified? How can we make future AI systems more robust than today’s, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked?
- Talks:
- Panel with Anca Dragan (Berkeley), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Guru Banavar (IBM), Oren Etzioni (Allen Institute), Tom Gruber (Apple), Jürgen Schmidhuber (Swiss AI Lab), Yann LeCun (Facebook/NYU), Yoshua Bengio (Montreal) (video)
1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1500: Breakout sessions
1500-1800: Superintelligence: Science or fiction? If human level general AI is developed, then what are likely outcomes? What can we do now to maximize the probability of a positive outcome? (video)
- Talks:
- Panel with Bart Selman (Cornell), David Chalmers (NYU), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Jaan Tallinn (CSER/FLI), Nick Bostrom (FHI), Ray Kurzweil (Google), Stuart Russell (Berkeley), Sam Harris, Demis Hassabis (DeepMind): If we succeed in building human-level AGI, then what are likely outcomes? What would we like to happen?
- Panel with Dario Amodei (OpenAI), Nate Soares (MIRI), Shane Legg (DeepMind), Richard Mallah (FLI), Stefano Ermon (Stanford), Viktoriya Krakovna (DeepMind/FLI): Technical research agenda: What can we do now to maximize the chances of a good outcome? (video)
1800-2200: Banquet
Sunday January 8
0730-0900: Breakfast
0900-1200: Law, policy & ethics: How can we update legal systems, international treaties and algorithms to be more fair, ethical and efficient and to keep pace with AI?
- Talks:
- Panel with Martin Rees (CSER/Cambridge), Heather Roff-Perkins, Jason Matheny (IARPA), Steve Goose (HRW), Irakli Beridze (UNICRI), Rao Kambhampati (AAAI, ASU), Anthony Romero (ACLU): Policy & Governance (video)
- Panel with Kate Crawford (Microsoft/MIT), Matt Scherer, Ryan Calo (U. Washington), Kent Walker (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI): AI & Law (video)
- Panel with Kay Firth-Butterfield (IEEE, Austin-AI), Wendell Wallach (Yale), Francesca Rossi (IBM/Padova), Huw Price (Cambridge, CFI), Margaret Boden (Sussex): AI & Ethics (video)
1200-1300: Lunch
1300: Depart