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".

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The University of Cambridge has opened a £10 million research centre to explore the impact of artificial intelligence, Wired reports.

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence — first announced last December and funded with a research grant from the Leverhulme Trust — will study the impacts of this "potentially epoch-making technological development, both short and long term."

The centre's new website details a list of projects that its researchers will look at. Projects include:

Science, value, and the future of intelligence

Policy and responsible innovation

The value alignment problem

Kinds of intelligence

Autonomous weapons — prospects for regulation

AI: Agents and persons

The centre, which is due to start work this month and will eventually have its own building on Mill Lane in the heart of Cambridge, also writes on its website that its aim is to build a new interdisciplinary community of researchers, with strong links to technologists and the policy world.

Led by Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price, the centre, will work in conjunction with the university’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), which is funded by Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn and looks at emerging risks to humanity’s future including climate change, disease, warfare, and artificial intelligence.

Zoubin Ghahramani, deputy director of the new centre and professor of information engineering at Cambridge, said in a statement last December: "The field of machine learning continues to advance at a tremendous pace, and machines can now achieve near-human abilities at many cognitive tasks—from recognising images to translating between languages and driving cars.

"We need to understand where this is all leading, and ensure that research in machine intelligence continues to benefit humanity. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence will bring together researchers from a number of disciplines, from philosophers to social scientists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists, to help guide the future of this technology and study its implications."

Think it sounds interesting? Well, you could be in luck. The centre is currently looking for PhD students to focus on the "study of values and intelligence."

Stephen Cave, director of the centre, told Business Insider: "So far, the core team is about 15 people. We are now starting to recruit post-doctoral researchers (about 12 in the first year). But not all of these people will be based in Cambridge, and not all of those who are based in Cambridge will be physically in our premises (because they already have offices)."