One recommendation in the report is to raise the awareness of and expertise about artificial intelligence at all levels of government, Dr. Stone said. It also calls for increased public and private spending on A.I.
“There is a role for government and we respect that,” said David Kenny, general manager for IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence division. The challenge, he said, is “a lot of times policies lag the technologies.”
A memorandum is being circulated among the five companies with a tentative plan to announce the new organization in the middle of September. One of the unresolved issues is that Google DeepMind, an Alphabet subsidiary, has asked to participate separately, according to a person involved in the negotiations.
The A.I. industry group is modeled on a similar human rights effort known as the Global Network Initiative, in which corporations and nongovernmental organizations are focused on freedom of expression and privacy rights, according to someone briefed by the industry organizers but not authorized to speak about it publicly.
Separately, Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn who has a background in artificial intelligence, is in discussions with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab to fund a project exploring the social and economic effects of artificial intelligence.
Both the M.I.T. effort and the industry partnership are trying to link technology advances more closely to social and economic policy issues. The M.I.T. group has been discussing the idea of designing new A.I. and robotic systems with “society in the loop.”
The phrase is a reference to the long-running debate about designing computer and robotic systems that still require interaction with humans. For example, the Pentagon has recently begun articulating a military strategy that calls for using A.I. in which humans continue to control killing decisions, rather than delegating that responsibility to machines.
“The key thing that I would point out is computer scientists have not been good at interacting with the social scientists and the philosophers,” said Joichi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab and a member of the board of directors of The New York Times. “What we want to do is support and reinforce the social scientists who are doing research which will play a role in setting policies.”
The Stanford report attempts to define the issues that citizens of a typical North American city will face in computers and robotic systems that mimic human capabilities. The authors explore eight aspects of modern life, including health care, education, entertainment and employment, but specifically do not look at the issue of warfare. They said that military A.I. applications were outside their current scope and expertise, but they did not rule out focusing on weapons in the future.
The report also does not consider the belief of some computer specialists about the possibility of a “singularity” that might lead to machines that are more intelligent and possibly threaten humans.
“It was a conscious decision not to give credence to this in the report,” Dr. Stone said.
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