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Elon Musk donates R115 million to prevent the robot apocalypse

No stranger to making statements about the impeding doom of humanity should we fail to keep artificial intelligence (AI) in check, Elon Musk has decided to put his money where his mouth is with a $10 million (R115 million)  donation to the Future Life Institute (FLI) “to keep AI beneficial”.

Last Week the Future Life Institute published an open letter about “avoiding (the) potential pitfalls” of AI and it drew signatures from the likes of several MIT professors and experts from IBM’s Watson supercomputer team and Microsoft Research. Musk’s donation will be used to set up and run a global research program which will award the funds to AI researchers involved in the creation of AI as well as research into other fields such as economics, law, ethics and policy surrounding AI.

The application portal will open on the 22nd of January on the FLI website and “anybody can send in a grant proposal,” said FLI co-founder Viktoriya Krakovna. “The best ideas will win regardless of whether they come from academia, industry or elsewhere”.

“It’s wonderful, because this will provide the impetus to jump-start research on AI safety”, said Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence president Tom Dietterich. “This addresses several fundamental questions in AI research that deserve much more funding than even this donation will provide.”

Hopefully the donation will be the catalyst that ensures that when humanity does finally invent true AI the fears of a robot apocalypse shared by Musk, Stephen Hawking and others will never be realised.

[Source – FLI, Via – Engadget, Image – Shutterstock]

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