‘Treat AI as threat to the human race’
ARTIFICIAL intelligence risks human extinction and should be treated like other global threats such as nuclear war, experts have warned.
Some of the biggest names in the field signed a statement highlighting the risks of what they’re working on.
It says: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societalscale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The message was organised by the Centre for AI Safety, a San Franciscobased non-profit group that aims “to reduce societal-scale risks from AI”.
It said the use of AI in warfare could be “extremely harmful” as it could be used to develop chemical weapons and enhance aerial combat.
Among the signatories are Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, the chief executive and co-founder of ChatGPT-developer OpenAI.
The list also included dozens of academics, senior bosses at companies like Google DeepMind, the cofounder of Skype, and the founders of AI company Anthropic.
It was also signed by Geoffrey Hinton, who is sometimes dubbed the “godfather of AI”.
He was jointly awarded the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and NYU Professor Yann LeCun for their ground-breaking work in the field. But Prof LeCun, who also works at Facebook-owner Meta, has said these apocalyptic warnings are overstated.
He previously tweeted: “I think that the magnitude of the AI alignment problem has been ridiculously overblown and our ability to solve it widely underestimated.”
The new warning comes after others called for a halt to the development of next-generation AI technology.
An open letter in March, signed by experts including Tesla boss Elon Musk, questioned whether we should “develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us”.
Last week Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met with tech bosses to discuss AI regulation.
He said: “People will be concerned by the reports that AI poses existential risks, like pandemics or nuclear wars.
“I want them to be reassured that the Government is looking very carefully at this.”