Google has launched the Digital Futures Project, an initiative that aims to bring together a range of voices to promote efforts to understand and address the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). As part of the Project, Google.org is establishing a $20 million fund, which will provide grants to leading think tanks and academic institutions around the world to facilitate dialogue and inquiry into this important technology.

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AI has the potential to make our lives easier and address some of society’s most complex challenges — like preventing disease, making cities work better and predicting natural disasters. But it also raises questions about fairness, bias, misinformation, security and the future of work.

Answering these questions will require deep collaboration among industry, academia, governments and civil society. The fund will support independent thinkers representing a range of perspectives and expertise to explore several issues.

Inaugural grantees of the Digital Futures Fund include the Aspen Institute, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for a New American Security, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for Security and Technology, Leadership Conference Education Fund, MIT Work of the Future, R Street Institute and SeedAI. The fund will support institutions from countries around the globe.

In 2018 Google published a set of AI Principles to guide its work, and established a governance team to put them into action by conducting rigorous reviews of new systems. Our teams also regularly publish industry-leading research on issues like fairness, equity, security, privacy and safety.