University of Cambridge opens AI 'morality and governance' centre
The University of Cambridge has opened the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, a £10m research facility that will investigate the impact and future of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including its morality and governance. Researchers from a range of disciplines will "help guide the future of this technology and study its implications".

Picture a self-driving car that sees a pedestrian in the road and has to swerve to avoid them. Now imagine there are cyclists on both sides of the car – and only the one on the right is wearing a helmet. Should the car veer right, to avoid killing the unprotected rider, even if that means punishing safer cycling? Stephen Cave chuckles ruefully. “At least since Socrates we’ve been worrying about moral philosophy and how to describe what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Now suddenly we’ve got to programme this into artificial systems and it’s like, damn, we haven’t got very far.”

Cave, 43, is executive director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, which opens in Cambridge on October 17 2016. Funded with a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, the think tank is intended to bring together thinkers and practitioners to address the questions posed by AI, from simple definitions (what exactly is AI anyway?) to moral and legal conundrums (when AIs kill, who should get the blame?). Territory that, as Cave notes, rapidly exposes the vagueness of our existing understandings.

“The machine learning guys say, ‘What should we do, what should I programme?’, and the philosophers are like, ‘Yeah, we haven’t quite worked that out yet.’ Suddenly, a whole load of philosophical projects that ethical philosophers have been worrying about for centuries have to go into fast-forward and produce some answers very, very quickly.”

Read more: Stephen Cave: 'Sorry, Dr Kurzweil, the singularity is a way off'

The list of researchers on the Centre’s nine projects features a roll call of AI luminaries: Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, is leading one, as are Imperial College’s Murray Shanahan and Berkeley’s Stuart Russell. But the interdisciplinary project also includes specialists in law, politics and psychology. One project on “Kinds of Intelligence” is being led by Marta Halina, an expert in the cognition of chimpanzees.

“That’s a project with a theoretical element that’s also practically very relevant,” says Cave, a philosopher by training whose 2012 book Immortalityinvestigated attitudes towards dying. “Those worrying about risks can use these milestones to think, well, if we reach that point then such-and-such a response needs to be triggered.”

Stephen Cave on…

** General AI **: "There's an assumption we're moving towards human-like intelligence, and it just isn't going to work like that. We're going to see a lot of narrow AI before we see general AI (AGI), and when we do get AGI it's not going to be one thing - it will be a menagerie of systems, some dangerous, some useful"

** The Kill Switch **: "We need to be able to control these systems. The difficulty comes when they become so sophisticated they can effectively start enhancing themselves and influencing their environment, even changing their goals. But if we're creating tools, we need to know where the off button is"