The Prime Minister’s adviser on Artificial Intelligence has warned that AI systems will be powerful enough to kill humans within two years unless we ct now.
According to The Times:
Matt Clifford, who is helping the prime minister set up the government’s AI taskforce, said policymakers should be prepared for threats ranging from cyberattacks to the creation of bioweapons if mankind fails to find a way to control the technology.
“You can have really very dangerous threats to humans that could kill many humans, not all humans, simply from where we’d expect models to be in two years time,” he said, speaking on TalkTV.
In the medium term, experts caution that AI could be used to design chemical and biological weapons and conduct massive attacks over the internet.
Last week a statement signed by 350 AI experts, including the CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, warned there was also a risk in the longer term that the technology could lead to the extinction of humanity.
Clifford, who chairs the government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), said that this “sounds like the plot of a movie” but was a real concern — and one reason why countries needed to work across borders to create regulations.
“The kind of existential risk that I think the letter writers were talking about is . . . what happens once we effectively create a new species, you know an intelligence that is greater than humans,” he said, adding that on a “bullish” time scale we could have a computer cleverer than a human within two years.
“If we try and create artificial intelligence that is more intelligent than humans and we don’t know how to control it, then that’s going to create a potential for all sorts of risks now and in the future . . . it’s right that it should be very high on the policymakers’ agendas.”
What concerned him about the present situation, he said, was that “the people who are building the most capable systems freely admit that they don’t understand exactly how they exhibit the behaviours that they do”. When asked whether this was “quite terrifying”, Clifford replied: “Absolutely”.
However, Clifford said that AI also had the potential to be an overwhelming force for good — provided that we find ways to control it. “If it goes right . . . you can imagine AI curing diseases, making the economy more productive, helping us get to a carbon neutral economy.”
