Elon Musk and AI experts around the world have signed an open letter demanding giant AI experiments to be put on ice for six months due to “profound risks to society and humanity” caused by AI.
Musk, Steve Wozniak (Co-founder of Apple) and Craig Peters (CEO of Getty Images) all agree. Join us as we see what they say.
In an open letter, around 2000 (at the time of writing) people from around the world agree that AI can destroy this world just like in the Terminator series, but they also recognise the benefits this new technology can bring us.
They state very reasonable questions such as:
- Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?
- Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?
- Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?
- Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?
Per the letter, developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
That’s asking a lot: OpenAI launched the latest version of its language model, GPT-4, this month; Google started rolling out its AI chatbot called Bard last week; and Microsoft added AI capabilities to its Bing search engine in February. AI is everywhere.
The letter calls out AI systems’ tendency toward confidently pumping out misinformation and discusses AI’s potential to automate jobs and “outsmart” and “replace us” to the point that we “risk loss of control of our civilization.”
It was penned by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit ‘/organization focused on mitigating existential threats to humanity, particularly AI. Notable signatories besides Musk include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and politician Andrew Yang.
To ensure AI ends up being more WALL-E than Skynet, the letter asks AI labs to use what it calls an “AI summer” break to create and implement safety protocols that ramp up oversight on the development of artificially intelligent systems. If not, it asks governments to step in and force the pause.
By Ieuan, Yr8
Carre’s Grammar School, Sleaford
Very good