Motivating the Greatest Geniuses in AI to Change the World Instead of Destroy It

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks," said data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera. What else are many of the top AI folks working on? Instead of solving world hunger or cleaning up the ocean or curing cancer, they're working on killing people and getting people to buy crap they don't really want or need. Sure, the absolute best of the best in the field have the creative freedom to tackle whatever they want but those folks are few and far between. There are only so many pure research positions. A company or college has to achieve incredible success before they have enough money to bet on long term projects that may never work out. Google is one of those companies. The University of Toronto kept the tiny field of neural networks alive for decades when it looked like it might never solve a real world problem. There are others but not many. The fact is to fund real, civilization changing research you need surplus money. And surplus money doesn't come easy.