Artificial intelligence (AI) might be the most important technology we ever develop. Ensuring it is safe and used beneficially is one of the best ways we can safeguard the long-term future. Ensuring AI is used to benefit everyone is already a challenge, and it's critical we get it right. As AI becomes more powerful, so does its scope for affecting our economy, politics, and culture. This has the potential to be either extremely good, or extremely bad. On the one hand, AI could help us make advances in science and technology that allow us to tackle the world's most important problems. On the other hand, powerful but out-of-control AI systems ("misaligned AI") could result in disaster for humanity. Given the stakes, working towards beneficial AI is a high-priority cause that we recommend supporting, especially if you care about safeguarding the long-term future.

Why is ensuring beneficial AI important?

We think ensuring beneficial AI is important for three reasons:

  • AI is a technology that is likely to cause a transformative change in our society — and poses some risk of ending it.
  • Relative to the enormous scale of this risk, not enough work is being done to ensure AI is developed safely and in the interests of everyone.
  • There are things we can do today to make it more likely that AI is beneficial.
  • What is the potential scale of AI's impact?

    In 2019, AI companies attracted roughly $40 billion USD in disclosed investments. This number has increased over the last decade, and is likely to continue growing.

    Already the results of these investments are impressive: in 2014, AI was only able to generate blurry, colourless, generic faces. But within just a few years, its synthetic faces became indistinguishable from photographs, as you can see below.

    source: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas/long-term-future/artificial-intelligence?gad=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhuX0lN64gQMVT5KDBx3WcwupEAAYAiAAEgJZ5PD_BwE

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