Developers of AI now have an added incentive to pursue their work: $5 million dollars

Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are now having an added incentive to chase their goals: $5 million dollars. The announcement regarding the prize money came on Wednesday at the annual TED conference, in a joint project between technology giant IBM and X Prize. X Prize is the company that was behind the world’s first private space race to visit the moon.

Motivating the competition backers is one of the other things it is a desire to showcase the potential advantages to mankind of advances in AI however some skeptics aren’t convinced so far.

At the time of unveiling the prize, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis said that he was personally sick and fed up of the dystopian conversation related to artificial intelligence.

According to an X Prize statement, the competition will challenge the participating teams to develop and showcase how humans can team up with strong cognitive technologies to deal with some of the world’s grand challenges.

The announcement of the winner will be made at the 2020 TED conference wherein three finalists will take the stage, however, in the meantime each year will see participants competing for interim prizes, looking forward to set into the next round.

In a press release, IBM said, “We believe AI will be the most important technology of our lifetimes, and our scientists, researchers, and developers have decades of innovation ahead of them”.

However, it is specifically this huge potential that has led many to wonder, to pause to question if there is a need to slow down and think about AI implications, before tearing forward with its evolution.

Possibly the most dramatic personification of such concerns is the debate surrounding the development of autonomous weapons, war machines that can take deadly decisions without any human input.