Asilomar AI Principles
In plain wordsA list of 23 guidelines for safe and beneficial AI drawn up at a 2017 conference in California and signed by thousands of researchers and public figures.
Twenty-three principles for the research, ethics and long-term governance of artificial intelligence, developed at the Beneficial AI 2017 conference organized by the Future of Life InstituteFuture of Life Institute, prop. n.: An advocacy group that warns about the dangers of advanced AI and other powerful technologies, funds research and lobbies governments. It organized the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, in January 2017. Grouped under research issues, ethics and values, and longer-term issues, they call for research aimed at beneficial rather than undirected intelligence; safety, failure transparency and judicial transparency; value alignment and human control; avoidance of an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons; shared benefit and prosperity; and caution about recursive self-improvement, with superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist. to be pursued only for ethical ends that are broadly shared. A principle was kept only if about 90 percent of attendees supported it. Signed by more than a thousand AI researchers and thousands of others, the principles were an early and influential voluntary framework, echoed in later corporate and governmental AI principles.
The company's ethics charter borrows several clauses almost word for word from the Asilomar AI Principles.
Origin
Drafted through surveys and discussion among more than 100 invited researchers, economists, lawyers and philosophers at the 5–8 January 2017 conference. The name deliberately echoes the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, a precedent for scientists setting rules for a powerful technology.
Related
- Future of Life InstituteFuture of Life Institute, prop. n.: An advocacy group that warns about the dangers of advanced AI and other powerful technologies, funds research and lobbies governments. It organized the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments.
- AI ethicsAI ethics, n.: The study of what is right and wrong in how AI is built and used: who it may harm, who is responsible when it fails, and which values it should respect.
- AI alignmentAI alignment, n.: Making an AI system genuinely try to do what the people it serves want — not a literal-minded, distorted or self-serving version of it. Also the research field working on this.
- Pause Giant AI ExperimentsPause Giant AI Experiments, prop. n.: A 2023 open letter, signed by tens of thousands of people including prominent technologists, that asked AI labs to halt the training of any AI more capable than GPT-4 for at least half a year.
- Statement on AI RiskStatement on AI Risk, prop. n.: A one-sentence public statement from May 2023, signed by hundreds of leading AI scientists and company heads, declaring that guarding against the chance of AI wiping out humanity should rank as a priority for the whole world.
- superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist.
Sources
- Future of Life Institute (2017). Asilomar AI Principles.
Mentioned in
Future of Life InstituteFuture of Life Institute, prop. n.: An advocacy group that warns about the dangers of advanced AI and other powerful technologies, funds research and lobbies governments. It organized the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments., Max TegmarkMax Tegmark, prop. n.: A Swedish-American physicist at MIT who co-founded the Future of Life Institute, which organized the 2023 open letter calling for a pause in training the most powerful AI systems., Pause Giant AI ExperimentsPause Giant AI Experiments, prop. n.: A 2023 open letter, signed by tens of thousands of people including prominent technologists, that asked AI labs to halt the training of any AI more capable than GPT-4 for at least half a year., Open Letter on Artificial IntelligenceOpen Letter on Artificial Intelligence, prop. n.: A 2015 open letter, signed by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and many leading AI researchers, urging that AI research aim not only at making systems more capable but also at making them safe and beneficial.