Global Courant 2023-05-31 11:03:54
An artificial intelligence arms race between countries and companies to see who can develop the most powerful AI machines could pose an existential threat to humanity, the co-founder of an AI security nonprofit told Fox News.
“AI could be at risk of extinction, and part of the reason for this is that we are currently in an AI arms race,” said Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety. “We are building more and more powerful technologies and we don’t know how to fully master or understand them.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, signed the statement from the Center for AI Safety saying that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“We did the same thing with nuclear weapons,” he continued. “We’re all in the same boat when it comes to existential risk and the risk of extinction.”
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Hendrikcks firm released a statement Tuesday warned that “the risk of AI extinction should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Many top AI researchers, developers and executives, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and “the godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, signed the statement.
Altman recently pleaded for the government to regulate AI in congressional testimony “to mitigate the risks of the technology.”
“I am concerned that AI development is a relatively uncontrolled process and that the AIs will eventually gain more influence in society because they are so good at automating things,” Hendrycks, who also signed his organization’s statement, told me. to Fox News. “They’re competing with each other and there’s an ecosystem of agents doing a lot of the operations, and we could lose control of that process.”
“That could make us a second-rate species or follow the way of the Neanderthals,” he continued.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been outspoken about potential AI threats, saying the technology could lead to “destruction of civilization” or election interference. Musk also signed a letter in March advocating for major AI experiments to be paused.
Elon Musk has warned that AI could cause “the destruction of civilization”. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
However, the letter has not prompted major AI developers like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google to suspend experiments.
“We have an AI arms race that could potentially push us to the brink of catastrophe, much like the nuclear arms race,” Hendrycks said. “So that means we need a global prioritization of this issue.”
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But the organizations creating the world’s most powerful AI systems have no incentive to slow or pause development, Hendrycks warned. With its statement, the Center for AI Safety hopes to inform people that AI poses a credible and important risk.
“Now hopefully we can start the conversation so it can be addressed like those other global priorities, like international agreements or regulations,” Hendrycks told Fox News. “We need to treat this as a bigger priority, a social priority and a technical priority, to mitigate these risks.”
Click here to watch the full interview with Hendrycks.
Jon Michael Raasch is an associate producer/writer at Fox News Digital Originals.
