Famous entrepreneurs and academics warn: according to them, artificial intelligence (AI) “poses profound risks to society and humanity“. They are asking companies to curb the development of this technology.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are among the signatories of an open letter that asks AI labs to halt their developmentfor a period of at least six months.
The text, published on the website of the Future of Life Instituteasserts that AI labs are “locked in an uncontrolled race to develop ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can reliably understand, predict or control“.
They called for a pause in creating any AI system that would be more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, the origin of the hugely popular chatbot, ChatGPT.
AI developers should also collaborate with policy makers to “significantly accelerate the development of robust systems of governance” and allow the creation of controls, with shared security protocols, supervised by independent experts.
The explosion of interest in tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E, an image generator, has also raised many questions regarding the ethics and impact of these powerful new tools.
Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) has repeatedly sounded the alarm, stating that it may soon exist. “potentially scary AI tools“.
Sarah Myers West, Executive Director of theAI Now Institutebelieves that today, “in many ways we are already there“, exacerbating AI systems “long-standing patterns of inequality“, especially in areas such as job search or education.
She claims that AI might be on the verge of profoundly altering the trajectory of life on Earth and that it “should be planned and managed with due care and resources“, which, according to the authors of the open letter, is not the case.
300 million jobs at risk
The letter coincides with the release of a separate report from Goldman Sachs, which estimates that 300 million full-time jobs might be affected by AI globally, being replaced by automation.
The good news, according to the note, is that “the displacement of workers due to automation has always been offset by the creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations as a result of technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-term job growth“.
