Artificial Intelligence Could Cause Human Extinction
- Science HowStuffWorks
EU officials also said on Tuesday that the bloc's industry chief Thierry Breton will hold a face-to-face meeting with Altman OpenAI in San Francisco next month.
Both are expected to discuss how the company will implement the bloc's first attempt to regulate artificial intelligence, which is scheduled to take effect in 2026.
Despite his recent calls for regulation, Altman threatened to pull his company out of Europe when the EU first floated these plans, saying that the proposals went too far, before retracting the threat.
The one-sentence statement on AI-related risks doesn't mention what the potential risks are, how severe they consider them to be, how it might be possible to mitigate them, or who should be responsible for doing so, except to say it "should be a global priority."
Before posting the statement, the AI Safety Center posted an exploration of recent comments by Yoshua Bengio, director of Montreal's Learning Algorithms Institute, theorizing on how AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Bengio argues that AI should be able to pursue goals by taking action in the real world, something that has yet to be attempted except in more closed spaces like popular games, such as chess and go.
And at that point, he says superintelligent AI may pursue goals that go against human values.
Bengio identified four ways AI might end up pursuing goals that could seriously clash with humanity's best interests.
The main one is humanity; the prospect of rogue human actors instructing AI to do something bad. Users have asked ChatGPT, for example, to formulate its plans for achieving world domination
He also says the AI may be given goals that are not properly specified or explained, and from there draw the wrong conclusions about its instructions.
A third possible area is the AI coming up with its own subgoals, in pursuit of broader targets set by humans, which might help it achieve the targets but at too great a cost.
