Like many other science fiction writers in the 1940s and 1950s, Asimov was greatly influenced by ideas from hard science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein about what future societies might look like. Heinlein's "Future History" series described a set of laws that were supposed to guide the behavior of citizen-soldiers in his future society. In Asimov's books, he explained that the Three Laws that were incorporated into virtually all robots within the fictional universe, so much so that breaking the law was viewed as an unthinkable violation of one's programming. In many cases, a robot found guilty of having broken the Laws would be dismantled for disposal. In essence, these three principles allow for a reliable set of guidelines for robots but do not prevent them from having significant impact on society -- which is what Asimov intended all along.

Artificial intelligence AI can bring substantial benefits to society by helping to reduce costs, increase efficiency and enable new solutions to complex problems. Using Floridi's notion of how to design the 'infosphere' as a starting point, in this chapter I consider the question: what are the limits of design, i.e. what are the conceptual constraints on designing AI for social good? The main argument of this chapter is that while design is a useful conceptual tool to shape technologies and societies, collective efforts towards designing future societies are constrained by both internal and external factors. Internal constraints on design are discussed by evoking Hardin's thought experiment regarding 'the Tragedy of the Commons'. Further, Hayek's classical distinction between 'cosmos' and 'taxis' is used to demarcate external constraints on design. Finally, five design principles are presented which are aimed at helping policymakers manage the internal and external constraints on design. A successful approach to designing future societies needs to account for the emergent properties of complex systems by allowing space for serendipity and socio-technological coevolution.

A coalition of AI groups is forming to produce a comprehensive data source on the coronavirus pandemic for policymakers and health care leaders. Why it matters: A torrent of data about COVID-19 is being produced, but unless it can be organized in an accessible format, it will do little good. The new initiative aims to use machine learning and human expertise to produce meaningful insights for an unprecedented situation. Driving the news: Members of the newly formed Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19 (CAIAC) announced today include the Future Society, a non-profit think tank from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, as well as the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and representatives from UN agencies. What they're saying: "With COVID-19 we realized there are tons of data available, but there was little global coordination on how to share it," says Cyrus Hodes, chair of the AI Initiative at the Future Society and a member of the CAIAC steering committee.

The Future Society is a nonprofit think-and-do-tank specialized in questions of impact and governance of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies. We are looking for a full-time Digital Marketing Intern to join our team for 10 to 14 weeks to work on the AI Civic Forum. The Future Society addresses the profound consequences of the current technological explosion. Our mission is to advance the global governance of Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies. About The Future Society: Our research addresses a range of AI governance topics, including AI ethics guidelines across sectors, policy frameworks for AI adoption in developing countries, AI for UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), geopolitics of AI, AI safety risks, and more.

A talk on "AI and our Future Society" will be delivered by Dr. Qiang Yang on 17 October 2018 at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) Conference Center. The talk will be followed by a seminar on "New advances in Transfer Learning" at the Milton E. Bender Jr. Auditorium.

Citizens, academics, government and business leaders should be empowered to decide and shape the course of Artificial Intelligence development. That is why, on September 26 at the European Parliament in Brussels, we are bringing together an across-disciplinary community to discuss the impact and governance of AI. During this event, we will release the report of our Global Civic Debate on'Governing the rise of AI' (www.aicivicdebate.org),

Artificial intelligence is already making significant inroads in taking over mundane, time-consuming tasks many humans would rather not do. The responsibilities and consequences of handing over work to AI vary greatly, though; some autonomous systems recommend music or movies; others recommend sentences in court. Even more advanced AI systems will increasingly control vehicles on crowded city streets, raising questions about safety--and about liability, when the inevitable accidents occur. But philosophical arguments over AI's existential threats to humanity are often far removed from the reality of actually building and using the technology in question. Deep learning, machine vision, natural language processing--despite all that has been written and discussed about these and other aspects of artificial intelligence, AI is still at a relatively early stage in its development.

Looking back at the history of artificial intelligence, it is plausible that we will witness similar setbacks in research interest or a temporary plateau in technological advancement, which might be caused by bottlenecks in computing power, quality of training data, or an inability to understand the outputs. In certain domains we might be able to develop systems to fully automate a cluster of tasks from end-to-end, like driving or financial modelling, but others might remain obscure for artificially intelligent systems.

When asked whether the introduction of AI would give people a better quality of life allowing them to spend more time with the families, on the beach, etc., Angelo Cangelosi said that this would certainly result in new job requirements, rebalancing the economy, salaries, etc. "If we manage this with expertise and good planning, then I'm an optimist," he concluded. UK authorities want to expand the use of AI to introduce robots into health care and allow self-driving cars, among other things. The draft plan includes educating workers to operate AI and promoting the use of AI to businesses and supporting research in this sphere.

Nicolas Economou is the CEO of electronic discovery and information retrieval firm H5, a Senior Advisor to the AI Initiative of the Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School, and is an advocate of the application of scientific methods to electronic discovery. If asked whether entirely autonomous, artificially intelligent judges should ever have the power to send humans to jail, most of us would recoil in horror at the idea. Our answer would be a firm "Never!" But assume that AI judges, devoid of biases or prejudices, could make substantially more equitable, consistent and fair systemwide decisions than humans could, nearly eliminating errors and inequities. Would (should?) our answer be different?