Top Highlights

• “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
• This statement, released this week by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), reflects an overarching — and some might say overreaching — worry about doomsday scenarios due to a runaway superintelligence.
• existential threats may manifest over the next decade or two unless AI technology is strictly regulated on a global scale.
• The statement has been signed by a who’s who of academic experts and technology luminaries ranging from Geoffrey Hinton (formerly at Google and the long-time proponent of deep learning) to Stuart Russell (a professor of computer science at Berkeley) and Lex Fridman (a research scientist and podcast host from MIT).
• In addition to extinction, the Center for AI Safety warns of other significant concerns ranging from enfeeblement of human thinking to threats from AI-generated misinformation undermining societal decision-making.

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