Artificial Intelligence Ethics a New Focus at Cambridge University - Digits - WSJ

Also see The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction? (The New Yorker)

"The new center will also collaborate with the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. A major focus of the collaboration would be around what Price called “the value alignment program,” where software programmers would team up with ethicists and philosophers on trying to write code that would govern the behavior of artificial intelligence programs.

“As a species, we need a successful transition to an era in which we share the planet with high-level, non-biological intelligence,” Price said. “We don’t know how far away that is, but we can be pretty confident that it’s in our future. Our challenge is to make sure that goes well.”

The new center in Cambridge joins others around the world set up recently to study the consequences of intelligent machines. In July, the Future of Life Institute, based in Cambridge, Mass., awarded $7 million from Elon Musk to “keep AI robust and beneficial.”"

Artificial Intelligence Ethics a New Focus at Cambridge University - Digits - WSJ