LONDON (BBC) - Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity, experts - including the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind - have warned.
Dozens have supported a statement published on the webpage of the Centre for AI Safety.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war” it reads.
But others say the fears are overblown.
Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have all supported the statement.
The Centre for AI Safety website suggests a number of possible disaster scenarios:
• AIs could be weaponised - for example, drug-discovery tools could be used to build chemical weapons
• AI-generated misinformation could destabilize society and “undermine collective decision-making”
• The power of AI could become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, enabling “regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive surveillance and oppressive censorship”
• Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI “similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E”
Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who issued an earlier warning about risks from super-intelligent AI, has also supported the Centre for AI Safety’s call.
Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the university of Montreal, also signed.
But Centre for AI Safety director Dan Hendrycks told BBC News future risks and present concerns “shouldn’t be viewed antagonistically”.
“Addressing some of the issues today can be useful for addressing many of the later risks tomorrow,” he said.