Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence

In January 2015, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and dozens of artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter on artificial intelligence calling for research on the societal impacts of AI. The letter affirmed that society can reap great potential benefits from artificial intelligence, but called for concrete research on how to prevent certain potential "pitfalls": artificial intelligence has the potential to eradicate disease and poverty, but researchers must not create something which cannot be controlled. The four-paragraph letter, titled Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: an Open Letter, lays out detailed research priorities in an accompanying twelve-page document.

By 2014, both physicist Stephen Hawking and business magnate Elon Musk had publicly voiced the opinion that superhuman artificial intelligence could provide incalculable benefits, but could also end the human race if deployed incautiously (see Existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence). Hawking and Musk both sit on the scientific advisory board for the Future of Life Institute, an organization working to "mitigate existential risks facing humanity". The institute drafted an open letter directed to the broader AI research community, and circulated it to the attendees of its first conference in Puerto Rico during the first weekend of 2015. The letter was made public on January 12.

The letter highlights both the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence. According to Bloomberg Business, Professor Max Tegmark of MIT circulated the letter in order to find common ground between signatories who consider superintelligent AI a significant existential risk, and signatories such as Professor Oren Etzioni, who believe the AI field was being "impugned" by a one-sided media focus on the alleged risks. The letter contends that:

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