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Elon Musk Gives $7 Million To Rein In Artificial Intelligence

SACRAMENTO (CBS Sacramento) - Elon Musk fears computers may one day become smarter than humans and turn on humanity.

In an effort to fend off this nightmare scenario, the famed entrepreneur is joining with the Open Philanthropy Project to donate about $7 million to a program designed to rein in Artificial Intelligence, reports Datanami.com.

The largest individual grant went to University of California at Berkeley researchers to observe how humans interact with AI programs.

Some of the money would fund researchers from Cambridge and Oxford universities in England to "develop policies to be enacted by governments, industry leaders, and others in order to minimize risks and maximize benefit from artificial intelligence development."

The British researchers said they would focus on the "strategic implications of powerful AI systems as they come to exceed human capabilities in most domains of interest, and the policy responses that could best be used to mitigate the potential risks of this technology."

The rest of the money will be split among many researchers who are trying to track and maintain the efficacy of AI.

Skype-founder Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, noted in a statement announcing the grants: "Building advanced AI is like launching a rocket. The first challenge is to maximize acceleration, but once it starts picking up speed, you also need to focus on steering."

The projects are designed to anticipate how AI might behave in the near and far futures.

"How can an AI system behave carefully and conservatively in a world populated by unknown unknownsaspects that the designers of the AI system have not anticipated at all?" asked Tom Dietterich, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Also backing the effort are Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Google's DeepMind Technologies.

(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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