HILL TECH & CYBER BRIEFING: Rosy AI Outlook Takes Dark Shift

In January 2015, the newly formed—and grandly named—Future of Life Institute invited experts in artificial intelligence to spend a long weekend in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The result was a group photo, a written set of research priorities for the field and an open letter about how to tailor AI research for maximum human benefit. The tone of these documents was predominantly upbeat—it laid out some potentially disruptive consequences—but also noted that “the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable.”

The open letter FLI published on March 29 of this year was, well, different. The group warned that AI ...