14 DAY TRIAL // Five of the world's largest tech companies have come together to create an ethics board for AI development, with the purpose of guiding future AI development and set industry-wide best practices.
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is slowly taking over basic services at all major companies. At the moment, AI technologies are still out of the grasp of smaller companies, but the technology is slowly spreading to more and more businesses and industry verticals.
Before things get a chance to go haywire and Skynet becomes reality, some of the world's most talented engineers, currently working for the world's biggest companies, have come together to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, just like they did in the past with Internet and browser standards.
New coalition is an open platform, similar to W3C
This new coalition, named the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI), will serve as an open platform, similar to W3C and WHATWG, where everyone can join and participate in open discussions with equal rights.
Initial Partnership on AI members include Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft, all leading developers of AI technologies. Apple, Baidu, and Intel, also AI pioneers, aren't included as charter members but are expected to join.
Smaller companies, academics, non-profits, and specialists in policy and ethics are welcome to join, and selected figures will also be invited.
AI right now is like the Wild Wild West
"To meet its goals, the organization anticipates it will host discussions, commission studies, write and distribute reports on critical topics, and seek to develop and share best practices and standards for industry," the organization's FAQ page reads.
"Over the past five years, we’ve seen tremendous advances in the deployment of AI and cognitive computing technologies," says Francesca Rossi, AI Ethics Researcher, IBM Research. "This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century."
While AI is currently in its incipient stages of development, as many researchers view it, its applicability can span and reach into every facet of our daily lives, a notion that scares many people. The Partnership's initial role will also have to be of PR and marketing, in order to dispell AI's image of "destroyer of mankind" that many Hollywood movies have rushed to promote. Of course, that scenario is many decades away, based on current AI advancements.
The Partnership doesn't have any type of regulatory powers, but if all major players join, they could approve to create such entity.