Paper: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

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In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful AI. SIAI exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk. SIAI is fostering research, education, and outreach to increase the likelihood that the promise of AI is realized for the benefit of everyone.

There is a new paper by Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. It will appear in the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence:

The possibility of creating thinking machines raises a host of ethical issues.  These
questions relate both to ensuring that such machines do not harm humans and other
morally relevant beings, and to the moral status of the machines themselves.  The first
section discusses issues that may arise in the near future of AI.  The second section
outlines challenges for ensuring that AI operates safely as it approaches humans in its
intelligence.  The third section outlines how we might assess whether, and in what
circumstances, AIs themselves have moral status.  In the fourth section, we consider
how AIs might differ from humans in certain basic respects relevant to our ethical
assessment of them.  The final section addresses the issues of creating AIs more
intelligent than human, and ensuring that they use their advanced intelligence for
good rather than ill.

This paper serves as a good introduction to the problem of Friendly AI.

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