Stanford helped pioneer artificial intelligence. Now the university wants to put humans at its center. | Washington Post

For more details, see Opening the Gate | HAI

"On Monday, the university will launch the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), a sprawling think tank that aims to become an interdisciplinary hub for policymakers, researchers and the students who will go on to build the technologies of the future. They hope they can inculcate in that next generation a more worldly and humane set of values than those that have characterized it so far -- and guide politicians to make more sophisticated decisions about the challenging social questions wrought by technology.

“I could not have envisioned that the discipline I was so interested in would, a decade and a half later, become one of the driving forces of the changes that humanity will undergo,” said Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer and former Google vice president who is one of two directors of the new Stanford institute. “That realization became a tremendous sense of responsibility.”

The institute -- backed by the field’s biggest leaders and industry players -- is not the first such academic effort of its kind, but it is by far the most ambitious: It aims to raise more than $1 billion. And its advisory council is a who’s who of Silicon Valley titans, including former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer and co-founder Jerry Yang, and the prominent investor Jim Breyer. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates will keynote its inaugural symposium on Monday."

Stanford helped pioneer artificial intelligence. Now the university wants to put humans at its center. | Washington Post