Professionals are scared of the dangerous prospects for the development of AI
The risk of the extinction of humanity due to artificial intelligence should become a global priority, experts say. Hundreds of technology leaders are urging the world to treat AI as a threat on par with pandemics and nuclear war.
A group of leading technology experts from around the world have warned that artificial intelligence technologies should be viewed as a social risk and placed in the same class of priorities as pandemics and nuclear wars, writes The Guardian.
A statement signed by hundreds of leaders and scientists, was published by the Center for Artificial Intelligence Security on Tuesday amid growing concerns about regulation and the risks the technology poses to humanity.
“Reducing the risk of extinction due to artificial intelligence should be a global priority along with other societal risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”, – says in the statement. The signatories included Google's DeepMind executives, ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and AI startup Anthropic.
World leaders and industry experts, such as those at OpenAI, have issued calls for regulation of the technology due to existential fears that it could significantly impact job markets, harm the health of millions, and use disinformation, discrimination, and impersonation.
This month, the man often referred to as the godfather of artificial intelligence – Geoffrey Hinton, also signer of the statement, – resigned from Google, citing «existential risk». The risk was reflected and acknowledged for the first time by the British Cabinet last week: the rapid change of course in government two months after the publication of the white paper on AI that industry officials warned about is already out of date, writes The Guardian.
According to Michael Osborne, a professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Mind Foundry, the letter released on Tuesday is not the first, but it is potentially the most impactful, given the broader range of signatories and its underlying existential problem.
“Really great that so many people signed up for this letter, – said the professor. – It does show that there is a growing awareness among those of us working in the field of AI that existential risks are a real problem”.
The potential for AI to exacerbate existing existential risks such as artificially created pandemics and race weapons, – these are the concerns that prompted Osborne to sign the public letter, along with new existential AI threats.
Calls to crack down on the threats follow the success of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that launched in November. The language model was widely adopted by millions of people and quickly surpassed all predictions by the industry's best-informed experts.
Osborne said: «Because we don't understand artificial intelligence very well, there is the prospect that it could play the role of a kind of new rival organism on the planet, that is, a kind of invasive species that we have developed and which can play a destructive role in our survival as a species”.