Giving Compass' Take:

• Kelsey Piper, writing for Vox, discusses the answers to several questions concerning the threat of AI to humanity, and deepening the general understand of what artificial intelligence truly is. 

• Piper mentions that there is a significant lack of policy planning or collaboration on technical AI safety. How can donors help spark capital and focus on this work? 

• Here are opportunities for individual donors in AI safety. 

The conversation about AI is full of confusion, misinformation, and people talking past each other — in large part because we use the word “AI” to refer to so many things. So here’s the big picture on how artificial intelligence might pose a catastrophic danger, in nine questions:

  1.  What is AI?  Artificial intelligence is the effort to create computers capable of intelligent behavior. It is a broad catchall term, used to refer to everything from Siri to IBM’s Watson to powerful technologies we have yet to invent.
  2. Is it even possible to make a computer as smart as a person? Lots of things humans do are still outside AI’s grasp. For instance, it’s hard to design an AI system that explores an unfamiliar environment, that can navigate its way from, say, the entryway of a building it’s never been in before up the stairs to a specific person’s desk.
  3. How exactly could it wipe us out? The idea that AI can become a danger is rooted in the fact that AI systems pursue their goals, whether or not those goals are what we really intended — and whether or not we’re in the way.
  4.  When did scientists first start worrying about AI risk? Scientists have been thinking about the potential of artificial intelligence since the early days of computers
  5.  Why couldn’t we just shut off a computer if it got too powerful? A smart AI could predict that we’d want to turn it off if it made us nervous. So it would try hard not to make us nervous, because doing so wouldn’t help it accomplish its goals.
  6. What are we doing right now to avoid an AI apocalypse? The truth is that technical work on promising approaches is getting done, but there’s shockingly little in the way of policy planning, international collaboration, or public-private partnerships.

Read the full article about taking AI as a serious threat to the human race by Kelsey Piper at Vox.