The Future of Life Institute were the beneficiaries of a donation from Elon Musk, who wants to ensure that AI stays friendly.
Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX, has decided to donate around $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, an organisation that's concerned with keeping artificial intelligence friendly to humans.
While they agree that technology has made our lives better, they are concerned with pitfalls posed by the increasing power of artificial intelligenceFLI co-founder Anthony Aguirre said that "while heavy industry and government investment has finally brought AI from niche academic research to early forms of a potentially world-transforming technology, to date relatively little funding has been available to help ensure that this change is actually a net positive one for humanity".
Elon Musk agrees with them too, and notes that the fact that so many researchers involved in the field are working with the FLI to avoid a Terminator-style scenario where AI turns on us, and sends assassins back through time to take us out. Well, maybe not that dramatic, but he said that the donation makes sense to him because "it's very obvious to me that humans should attempt to make the future of humanity good".
While we're all happy to say that he's trying to stop us from getting Terminated, there is also an element of cyber security to this which the donation will also help fund research in to, so it's not all about killer robots. Killer robots sounds better, though.