1/30/2017
A massive AI partnership is adding civil rights organizations to keep computers from repeating human mistakes — Quartz
STACKED
A massive AI partnership
is tapping civil rights and
economic experts to keep
AI safe
Dave Gershgorn

January 27, 2017
Jason Furman, former Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, joins the fight for ethical
machines. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
https://qz.com/896501/a­massive­ai­partnership­is­adding­civil­rights­organizations­to­keep­computers­from­repeating­human­mistakes/
1/4
1/30/2017
A massive AI partnership is adding civil rights organizations to keep computers from repeating human mistakes — Quartz
When the Partnership on Arti cial Intelligence to Bene t People and Society was
announced in September, it was with the stated goal of educating the public on
arti cial intelligence, studying AI’s potential impact on the world, and establishing
industry best practices. Now, how those goals will actually be achieved is becoming
clearer.
This week, the Partnership brought on new members that include representatives
from the American Civil Liberties Union, the MacArthur Foundation, OpenAI, the
Association for the Advancement of Arti cial Intelligence, Arizona State
University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
The organizations themselves are not of cially af liated yet—that process is still
underway—but the Partnership’s board selected these candidates based on their
expertise in civil rights, economics, and open research, according to interim cochair Eric Horvitz, who is also a director at Microsoft Research. The Partnership
also added Apple as a “founding member,” putting the tech giant in good company:
Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Facebook are already on board.
The Partnership is now the most high-pro le, comprehensive, and mainstream
organization considering how AI will shape our future. It not only has
representatives from nearly every major tech company that’s heavily invested in
machine-learning research, but also has backing from organizations that routinely
study the impacts of technology and bias on modern society. To succeed in its
mission would mean organizing a nascent eld, uncertain and fragmented in its
view of how AI should be implemented, while establishing guidelines that match
its members’ propitious rhetoric.
The Partnership’s most recent additions suggest it is also uniquely concerned with
understanding AI’s ability to create (or mimic) disparity.
“In its most ideal form, [the Partnership] puts on the agenda the idea of human
rights and civil liberties in the science and data science community,” says Carol
https://qz.com/896501/a­massive­ai­partnership­is­adding­civil­rights­organizations­to­keep­computers­from­repeating­human­mistakes/
2/4
1/30/2017
A massive AI partnership is adding civil rights organizations to keep computers from repeating human mistakes — Quartz
Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts who is joining the
Partnership’s board. “[This is] so the people who are developing machine
intelligence are aware, mindful, and cognizant of the impact of their choices,
because they’re not neutral choices.
“There’s a decision on, are you going to use arti cial intelligence to perpetuate
biases that exist in our human society? Is arti cial intelligence going to be
developed in a way that serves the 1% but not the 99%? Or instead, can arti cial
intelligence and [machine learning] be used to address deep issues of global
climate change or poverty? Those are fundamental ethical and moral issues it’s
important that the scienti c community engage in. What they do isn’t apolitical,
it’s deeply political.”
The ACLU has been doing similar work with universities like MIT and Harvard as a
part of its Technology for Liberty initiative. Rose says that if the Partnership turns
out to be toothless, she’ll back out and stop contributing.
The Partnership has also tapped Jason Furman, a veteran of the Obama
administration’s efforts to draw attention (pdf) to the economic impact of AI and
automation. Previously chairman of the Council on Economic Advisers under
Obama, Furman is joining the Partnership to guide its consideration of AI’s
economic bene ts.
“I think we’ve had insuf cient productivity growth in the United States,” Furman
told Quartz. “I think AI is very promising in terms of the future of our economy. We
need more [AI] than we’ve had to date, but we’re only going to have it more if
people are comfortable with it—if we’re getting the positives and not the negatives.
I don’t think that’s going to happen automatically, some of that will require best
practices and some of that will require public policy.”
Also joining up is Eric Sears from the MacArthur Foundation, which awards grants
for things like climate change and nuclear risk. “While there will be many bene ts
https://qz.com/896501/a­massive­ai­partnership­is­adding­civil­rights­organizations­to­keep­computers­from­repeating­human­mistakes/
3/4
1/30/2017
A massive AI partnership is adding civil rights organizations to keep computers from repeating human mistakes — Quartz
from AI, it is important to ensure that challenges such as protecting and advancing
civil rights, civil liberties, and security are accounted for,” Sears says. “The
Partnership is being set up to do just that.”
In a blog post on the MacArthur Foundation website, Sears also wrote that “the
public interest challenges these technologies present are unlikely to be adequately
addressed without philanthropy’s help.”
Other new members include OpenAI, a nonpro t funded by Elon Musk, Sam
Altman, and Peter Thiel that will look to research technical questions and provide
open access to knowledge in the AI community. OpenAI’s representative in the
Partnership, Dario Amodei, previously contributed to research on AI safety at
Google Brain.
The Partnership plans to fund research through grants that will separate its
participants’ work from their respective companies’ corporate umbrellas. Founding
companies will contribute on a multi-year basis, although the amount has yet to be
disclosed. The Partnership has yet to appoint an executive director—that role and
the rst round of research will likely be announced soon after its board of directors
meets for the rst time on Feb. 3 in San Francisco.
Among major tech out ts, Apple is late addition, despite working with the
Partnership from the beginning, according to Horvitz. The company will be
represented in the Partnership by Tom Gruber, who leads Apple’s Siri Advanced
Development team. Google will be represented by director of augmented
intelligence research Greg Corrado; Facebook by its director of AI research, Yann
LeCun; Amazon by its director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich; Microsoft by the
director of its research lab, Horvitz; and IBM by a research scientist at its T.J.
Watson Research Centre, Francesca Rossi.
https://qz.com/896501/a­massive­ai­partnership­is­adding­civil­rights­organizations­to­keep­computers­from­repeating­human­mistakes/
4/4