Artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to the extinction of humanity. We received a warning from an expert. The heads of OpenAI and Google DeepMind are experts in artificial intelligence. Dozens more endorsed the statement posted on the Center for AI Security’s website.
It says mitigating the risk of extinction from artificial intelligence should be a global priority. There are other societal risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war. There are also those who say that the fears are exaggerated.
This statement was supported by the CEOs of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI – Sam Altman, Google DeepMind – Demis Hassabis and Anthropic – Dario Amodei. Dr Geoffrey Hinton has issued an earlier warning about the risks of super-intelligent artificial intelligence. And now he supported the call. The invitation was also signed by Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the University of Montreal.
Hinton, Bengio and NIU professor Yann LeCun are often described as the “godfathers of artificial intelligence” for their groundbreaking work in the field. They jointly won the Turing Award in 2018. The Turing Award recognizes outstanding contributions to computer science.
LeCun, who works at Meta, said these apocalyptic warnings are exaggerated.
Many other experts similarly believe that fear that AI will destroy humanity is unrealistic. Such considerations distract from issues such as bias in systems that are already a problem. Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University, has previously said that science fiction-like disaster scenarios are unrealistic.
“Current artificial intelligence is nowhere near capable enough to materialize these risks,” he states.
Media coverage of the alleged “existential” threat from artificial intelligence has increased since March 2023. In March, experts, including Tesla boss Elon Musk, signed an open letter calling for a halt to the development of next-generation AI technology.
The letter asks whether we should be “developing non-human minds that could eventually outsmart, outwit, and replace us.” In contrast, the new campaign has a brief statement, designed to “open the discussion”.
