Artificial Intelligence could wipe out Humanity according to Experts

Top executives at artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, joined experts and professors on Tuesday in arguing that "the risk of AI leading to the extinction of humanity" is rising. They urged policymakers to equate this with the risks posed by pandemics and the outbreak of nuclear war.

"Reducing the risk of human extinction due to AI must be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," say more than 350 signatories to a letter published by the non-governmental organization Center for AI Safety (CAIS).

In addition to Altman, they include the CEOs of artificial intelligence firms DeepMind and Anthropic and executives from Microsoft and Google.

The letter was also signed by Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio - two of the three "Godfathers of AI" who received the Turing Prize in 2018 for their work on the so-called in-depth training - and professors from institutions ranging from Harvard to China's Tsinghua University.

A statement from CAIS pointed to Meta, where the third "godfather" of AI, Yann Lecun, works, for not signing the letter. "We asked a lot of Meta employees to sign," said CAIS director Dan Hendricks.

The letter coincided with a meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council in Sweden, where policymakers are expected to talk about AI regulation.

Elon Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives were the first to point out potential risks to society in April. "We have extended an invitation (to Musk) and we hope he will sign it this week," Hendricks said.

Recent developments in AI have created tools that could have applications in a variety of fields, from medical diagnosis...

Continue reading on: