1. The Windfall Clause: Distributing the Benefits of AI for the Common Good
- Author
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Ben Garfinkel, Peter Cihon, Allan Dafoe, Cullen O'Keefe, Carrick Flynn, and Jade Leung
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Ex-ante ,Computer science ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,05 social sciences ,02 engineering and technology ,Common good ,Politics ,Computer Science - Computers and Society ,Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ,Software deployment ,0502 economics and business ,Humanity ,Computers and Society (cs.CY) ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,Marketing ,Social responsibility ,050203 business & management - Abstract
As the transformative potential of AI has become increasingly salient as a matter of public and political interest, there has been growing discussion about the need to ensure that AI broadly benefits humanity. This in turn has spurred debate on the social responsibilities of large technology companies to serve the interests of society at large. In response, ethical principles and codes of conduct have been proposed to meet the escalating demand for this responsibility to be taken seriously. As yet, however, few institutional innovations have been suggested to translate this responsibility into legal commitments which apply to companies positioned to reap large financial gains from the development and use of AI. This paper offers one potentially attractive tool for addressing such issues: the Windfall Clause, which is an ex ante commitment by AI firms to donate a significant amount of any eventual extremely large profits. By this we mean an early commitment that profits that a firm could not earn without achieving fundamental, economically transformative breakthroughs in AI capabilities will be donated to benefit humanity broadly, with particular attention towards mitigating any downsides from deployment of windfall-generating AI., Short version to be published in proceedings of AIES
- Published
- 2019