The next phase of digital technologies, including those focused on machine intelligence, can have tremendous benefits for humanity. But on their current path, they are likely to have tremendous negative consequences. This is for four interrelated reasons.

1. Current AI is largely focused on data collection and monitoring that disempowers workers and citizens and empowers governments and companies that are already disproportionately influential in critical social decisions. This imbalance has significant economic and social costs.
2. The field of AI has, from its very early stages, excessively focused on reaching and surpassing human capabilities and intelligence. This has made it biased towards automation, rather than using digital technologies for amplifying human capabilities and creating new tasks for workers. Automation, when practiced at the expense of other technological paths, tends to have adverse effects and rarely delivers on the promised productivity gains.
3. New technologies are most useful when they are embedded in a democratic setting, where society at large has a say in this direction and thus on its distributional consequences. The current trajectory of AI is not going in this direction.
4. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that AI scientists and practitioners do not take ethical issues seriously. Here by ethical issues I do not just mean philosophical questions, but also concerns about societal implications in the clear focus on who wins and who loses from specific paths of technology that we are charting at the moment.

The Institute for Ethics in AI will bring together world-leading philosophers and other experts in the humanities with the technical developers and users of AI in academia, business and government. The ethics and governance of AI is an exceptionally vibrant area of research at Oxford and the Institute is an opportunity to take a bold leap forward from this platform.

Every day brings more examples of the ethical challenges posed by AI; from face recognition to voter profiling, brain machine interfaces to weaponised drones, and the ongoing discourse about how AI will impact employment on a global scale. This is urgent and important work that we intend to promote internationally as well as embedding in our own research and teaching here at Oxford.