A handful of the most powerful US tech companies have promised to bring more control and openness to the development of artificial intelligence, in an attempt to stem growing worries about a technology seen as destroying jobs, increasing income inequality and even threatening the future of humanity.
The plans by the companies, including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, amounted to what one member of the group said was the first time an industry had ever banded together to shape the impact of a technology that had such a broad effect on the future of humanity.
“AI is on the cusp of transforming society and the consequences of this have to be studied in the open,” said Yann LeCun, head of AI at Facebook and one of the pioneers of deep learning, the technique that has propelled recent breakthroughs in the field. “It will transform the way we connect with each other, the way we get information, medicine, transport, the way cities are organised.”