The past few years have pro­vid­ed painful evi­dence that faster or new­er is not always bet­ter. Inno­va­tion, for its own sake, can eas­i­ly run afoul. Inno­v­a­tive weapons or sur­veil­lance sys­tems do not improve the world. How­ev­er, inno­v­a­tive means for lever­ag­ing pow­er­ful forces like love will cre­ate the next set of break­throughs for humanity.

Inno­va­tion will always require cal­cu­la­tion of risks. The sim­ple tenet in the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty of “do no harm” is the eas­i­est to apply to inno­va­tion. In the ear­ly days of Google, they adopt­ed the cor­po­rate mot­to “don’t be evil”. We leave it up to the read­er to decide how well that com­pa­ny has adhered to this guide­line. But if this notion can become more than a catchy slo­gan, and evolve to become a foun­da­tion­al mind­set adopt­ed by all, we believe cor­po­rate cul­tures will begin to dra­mat­i­cal­ly change.

One of the main eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions from the point of view of tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment, is how to cre­ate safe­guards for the tech­nolo­gies of tomor­row. As AI and Extend­ed Intel­li­gence evolve and inte­grate with more aspects of our dai­ly lives, the most impor­tant mea­sures we can take will be to ensure eth­i­cal val­ues are embed­ded into these sys­tems’ very rea­son for being.

“High­ly autonomous AI sys­tems should be designed so that their goals and behav­iors can be assured to align with human val­ues through­out their oper­a­tion… Val­ue align­ment is a big one. Robots aren’t going to try to revolt against human­i­ty, but they’ll just try to opti­mize what­ev­er we tell them to do. So we need to make sure to tell them to opti­mize for the world we actu­al­ly want.” — Anca Dra­gan, co-PI for the Cen­ter for Human Com­pat­i­ble AI

The val­ues that under­pin tech­no­log­i­cal progress can ben­e­fit immense­ly from fol­low­ing the bio­log­i­cal prin­ci­ple of mutu­al­ism. This form of sym­bio­sis, in which two or more dif­fer­ent organ­isms live or work togeth­er to mutu­al ben­e­fit, pro­vides a foun­da­tion for pos­i­tive inter­ac­tions. By look­ing at tech­nol­o­gy, like AI, holis­ti­cal­ly, we begin to see how humans and machines can work togeth­er to cre­ate pos­i­tive impacts for eco­log­i­cal and soci­etal ecosys­tems. To this end, a com­pre­hen­sive set of AI prin­ci­ples was devel­oped by The Future of Life Insti­tute (FLI) in con­junc­tion with the 2017 Asi­mo­lar Con­fer­ence on Ben­e­fi­cial AI. These prin­ci­ples were based around the respon­si­bil­i­ty for super­in­tel­li­gence to ben­e­fit not only just indi­vid­ual inter­ests, but to also work for the com­mon good.³³ FLI oper­ates as a char­i­ty and out­reach orga­ni­za­tion. The aim of FLI’s work is to make sure that the most pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies devel­oped by, and avail­able to, human­i­ty are employed to the advan­tage of human­i­ty as a whole.

“With less pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies such as fire, we learned to min­i­mize risks large­ly by learn­ing from mis­takes. With more pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, plan­ning ahead is a bet­ter strat­e­gy than learn­ing from mistakes.”
— Future of Life Insti­tute³⁴

Col­lec­tives like FLI are essen­tial for call­ing atten­tion to the pow­ers and poten­tial pit­falls of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. These groups of thinkers help us to cre­ate safe and pos­i­tive sce­nar­ios of how to inte­grate new tech­nolo­gies. We must choose not to pur­sue activ­i­ties like build­ing autonomous weapons that would tear human­i­ty down. Instead, we should choose to use the extend­ed intel­li­gence of our tech­nolo­gies to help human­i­ty flourish.

In the face of glob­al­ly foun­da­tion­al changes, we feel it’s more than like­ly that cor­po­rate lead­ers will shift the pri­or­i­ties of their com­pa­nies such that they con­tribute to the com­mon good. In this way, the cor­po­rate world will become more close­ly aligned with the grass­roots move­ments that have been con­tin­u­al­ly call­ing for new stan­dards of suc­cess. Rather than GDP defin­ing the val­ue of peo­ple (in a nation or city) through the goods and ser­vices pro­duced over a spe­cif­ic peri­od of time, the rel­e­vance of any group’s col­lec­tive effort can be bet­ter reflect­ed by the qual­i­ty of life enjoyed. A mean­ing­ful life does not require the cre­ation of mate­r­i­al wealth. Mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences arise more often from shar­ing qual­i­ty time with friends and fam­i­ly than from man­u­fac­tur­ing and buy­ing prod­ucts. To this effect, the future suc­cess of a com­pa­ny will cor­re­late with that company’s abil­i­ty to con­tribute to the health of its cor­re­spond­ing com­mu­ni­ty and envi­ron­ment. Endur­ing desires to improve qual­i­ty of life and expand path­ways to well­be­ing, we believe will be the pri­ma­ry dri­vers for inno­va­tion. The bold, dar­ing, and imag­i­na­tive out­comes of this approach will guide human­i­ty into incred­i­ble, unknown dimensions.