AI – Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality: Opening the Pod Bay Doors

Who among us hasn’t quoted Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Siri, demanding that she “open the pod bay doors.” So omnipresent in the human consciousness is misbehaving Artificial Intelligence, that Apple anticipated the request, programming Siri to respond back in kind.

And as technology’s rapid growth has made a nonfiction version of HAL seem plausible, a group of tech’s titans have joined forces to guard against their own creations’ potential for misbehavior.  The companies involved include Google, DeepMind, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. Assuming the somewhat clunky name “Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society,” the organization aims to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence and to create standards for future research and best practice.  Further, the partnership is constructed upon eight core tenets, including:

1. AI should benefit as many people as possible.

2. The development of AI should involve the public.

3. Research should be conducted with transparency.

4. AI systems’ reasoning should also be transparent and explainable.

Although the partnership’s stated goals are altruistic, self-interest may not be entirely banished from the equation. After all, its discussions, transparency and focus on ethics would logically soothe public concerns regarding AI’s possible unintended and unwanted effects. And the discourse may also serve to shape the attitudes of future consumers. Importantly, as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy began its own discussions only months earlier, hosting a series of workshops and groups regarding the AI’s risks and benefits. Although the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot rely on AI, the White House talks also revealed some hand-wringing. Among the concerns addressed by the government was possible job loss to AI, failures to predict and control the behavior of AI, and other complex policy, safety and regulatory questions. The partnership, of course, may serve to discourage government regulation, which could slow growth, innovation and the robot uprising.

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