Elon Musk has donated millions to the Future of Life Institute, and now the organization is putting that money to use by funding research into keeping artificial intelligence "robust and beneficial", i.e. not something that will turn on humanity Skynet style.
The institute announced this week that it will be issuing grants to 37 research teams, whittled down from an applicant least of around 300. The teams are taking on the killer AI issue from different angles, including teaching AI to learn what humans want, aligning robots’ interests with our own, and keeping AI under human control.
The institute provided this summary highlighting some of the grants:
Three projects developing techniques for AI systems to learn what humans prefer from observing our behavior, including projects at UC Berkeley and Oxford University
A project by Benja Fallenstein at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute on how to keep the interests of superintelligent systems aligned with human values
A project lead by Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University on making AI systems explain their decisions to humans
A study by Michael Webb of Stanford University on how to keep the economic impacts of AI beneficial
A project headed by Heather Roff studying how to keep AI-driven weapons under "meaningful human control"
A new Oxford-Cambridge research center for studying AI-relevant policy