DeepMind announces ethics group to focus on problems of AI

Deepmind, Google's London-based AI research sibling, has opened a new unit focused on the ethical and societal questions raised by artificial intelligence. The new research unit will aim "to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all", according to the company, which hit headlines in 2016 for building the first machine to beat a world champion at the ancient Asian board game Go. The company is bringing in external advisers from academia and the charitable sector, including Columbia development professor Jeffrey Sachs, Oxford AI professor Nick Bostrom, and climate change campaigner Christiana Figueres to advise the unit. "These Fellows are important not only for the expertise that they bring but for the diversity of thought they represent," said the unit's co-leads, Verity Harding and Sean Legassick, in a blogpost announcing its creation. The unit, called DeepMind Ethics and Society, is not the AI Ethics Board that DeepMind was promised when it agreed to be acquired by Google in 2014.