It's time for some messy, democratic discussions about the future of AI

With a new set of principles for artificial intelligence, tech pioneers seem to be developing a conscience. Good - but the discussion must include more voices

Today in Washington DC, leading US and UK scientists are meeting to share dispatches from the frontiers of machine learning - an area of research that is creating new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). Their meeting follows the publication of a set of principles for beneficial AI that emerged from a conference earlier this year at a place with an important history.

In February 1975, 140 people - mostly scientists, with a few assorted lawyers, journalists and others - gathered at a conference centre on the California coast. A magazine article from the time by Michael Rogers, one of the few journalists allowed in, reported that most of the four days' discussion was about the scientific possibilities of genetic modification. Two years earlier, scientists had begun using recombinant DNA to genetically modify viruses. The Promethean nature of this new tool prompted scientists to impose a moratorium on such experiments until they had worked out the risks. By the time of the Asilomar conference, the pent-up excitement was ready to burst. It was only towards the end of the conference when a lawyer stood up to raise the possibility of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that the scientists focussed on the task at hand - creating a set of principles to govern their experiments.