Issue 1, Thursday, March 1, 2018 – Sustainable Goals

Dear reader,

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of The Pulse, the AI for Good Foundation’s monthly email newsletter!

Today, we stand before global societal challenges that will test all of our intellect, all of our integrity, and all of our ingenuity. The next years will offer us the opportunity–perhaps the final opportunity–to fix the global externalities of a century of myopic growth and consumption.

From climate change, food shortages, droughts, and poverty, to unleashing the full productive potential of women and minorities, eradicating corruption, improving global health outcomes, and creating strong markets and institutions, we believe that Artificial Intelligence has an important role to play.

The incredible speed of our technological development has brought us an unprecedented ability to communicate, coordinate, and exchange the precious resources that this planet offers us. Technology helps us live longer, laugh harder, and love more strongly. In the past decade, the increased availability of large data sets describing real world systems–from social networks to traffic and oil drilling–have allowed us new insights into how the world works, and how to manage certain aspects of it more effectively.

A large part of the (growing) scientific effort is engaged in highly lucrative commercial applications, such as optimizing advertisements or dynamically pricing retail goods, rather than helping to solve these important problems. Why? Our market economy does not incentivize the non-monetary long-term profits of a more equitable society and healthier world.

In 2015, we started the AI for Good Foundation in order to bring these opportunities to the forefront of researchers’ and practitioners’ minds.

Our mission is to help make the problems, data, and solutions globally accessible, to engage the stakeholder communities (from scientists to policy-makers and beneficiaries), to push forward the state of the art, and to educate the general public about the things that can and need to be done.

We look at the big problems the world is facing through the lens of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 goals that aim to make the world a better place for all of its inhabitants by 2030. By supporting us, you support the only officially chartered 501(c)3 public charity whose aim is to use Artificial Intelligence directly for the greater good.

With each edition of The Pulse we intend to keep you abreast of the latest developments in our programs, major breakthroughs relevant to our mission, and opportunities for you to get involved. We are always very happy to hear from you, and we wouldn’t exist without you, so please let us know if you think there is something that we absolutely should be sharing.

By joining the AI for Good Foundation you become not just a passive observer, but an agent of change. We need everyone’s help in order to make a difference.

Yours with much hope for the future,
CEO, James Hodson