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Will Artificial Intelligence Lead to the Extinction of Humanity?

01.06.2023
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65746524

“Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity,” was the apocalyptic warning from a group of executives and scientists from technology companies including OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

"Reducing the risk of extinction of humanity due to the development of artificial intelligence should become a global priority along with other risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," said a statement published on the website of the Center for AI Security, a non-profit organization from San Francisco.

This is the entire text of the statement, which its authors deliberately kept as short as possible. "We didn't want to publish a list of 30 possible recommendations to ... not dilute our thinking," said the organization's chief executive, Dan Hendrix.

The statement has already been signed by more than 350 AI leaders, researchers and engineers, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei.

The document was also signed by Jeffrey Hinton and Joshua Bengio, Turing Award winners for their work on neural networks, who are often called the godfathers of AI. In early May, Hinton even resigned from his position at Google so that he could talk freely about the potential harms of technology without regard to professional ethics.

However, not all artificial intelligence experts share these alarmist sentiments. For example, Yang LeCun, vice president and lead AI researcher at Meta Corporation, sees them as highly exaggerated. "I think that the scale of the problem of equalizing AI [with human intelligence] has been ridiculously overstated and our ability to solve it has been grossly underestimated," he wrote.

Other experts agree with him, who believe that fears of AI are, firstly, unrealistic, and secondly, they divert attention from real problems. "Currently existing AI is not advanced enough for such concerns to materialize," Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan told the BBC.

Talk about how AI can either radically change human society for the better or completely destroy it has been in science fiction for the past 80 years. But only recently, technology has reached a new level. Now AI can write songs, generate realistic images, create computer code, write movie scripts, and so on. Right now, the problems posed by AI are largely about copyright and privacy infringement.

Elisabeth Renieris, Senior Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Artificial Intelligence Ethics, told the BBC she was more concerned that "the development of AI could increase automated decision-making ... and lead to the spread of disinformation."

 

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The Creator of Artificial Intelligence Warned of its Danger and Quit Google