Submitted by Clare Arnstein on Tue, 18/10/2016 - 10:49
Ambitious new centre launches at University of Cambridge
The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) will launch in Cambridge on 19 October 2016. A collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley, CFI will explore the implications of the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
Professor Stephen Hawking, who will speak at the Centre’s launch, said: “The rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which. The research done by this centre will be crucial to the future of our civilisation and of our species.”
CFI is funded by an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Its mission is to create an interdisciplinary community of researchers that will work closely with industry and policy-makers. It is the first centre of its kind that will examine both risks and benefits, short and long term.
CFI’s first research phase will see the start of a wide range of projects, on topics including the regulation of autonomous weapons, responsible innovation, making algorithms transparent, and the implications of AI for democracy.
The Academic Director of the Centre, and Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, Huw Price, said: “The creation of machine intelligence is likely to be a once-in-a-planet’s-lifetime event. It is a future we humans face together. Our aim is to build a broad community with the expertise and sense of common purpose to make this future the best it can be.”
CFI is hosted in the School of Arts and Humanities and brings together leading thinkers from philosophy to social sciences, to engineering and computing.
The launch is being hosted in the David Attenborough building on the New Museums Site.
For more information about CFI, visit their website lcfi.ac.uk.