Gen Chen: AI gurus jointly declare 'warning of AI extermination of humankind'

文/Chen Gen

Recently, the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) released an "Artificial Intelligence Risk Statement" signed by 350 scientists and business executives in the field of artificial intelligence. The main content of the statement is "Reduce Artificial Intelligence Risks that lead to human extinction should become a global priority alongside other society-scale risks such as epidemics and nuclear war."

This public statement brings together the opinions of the most authoritative artificial intelligence experts, nuclear scientists, epidemiologists and other experts and scholars in the world today. It can be said that the risks brought by artificial intelligence have been sorted out in the most comprehensive way. The signatories include three AI company executives: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei; also include Jeff, known as the Godfather of AI Ray Hinton, together with Joshua Bengio, one of the "Big Three" of AI and winner of the Turing Award; also signed the open letter were two Chinese scientists, the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Artificial Intelligence Ethics with Zeng Yi, director of the Governance Research Center, and Zhan Xianyuan, assistant researcher at Tsinghua Intelligent Industry Research Institute.

Artificial Intelligence Threat Theory

The development of artificial intelligence technology plays a role in promoting the progress of social science and technology. It is self-evident. However, while artificial intelligence has made breakthrough progress, its negative effects and psychological pressure on humans have become increasingly prominent. For example, more and more students are using artificial intelligence to write homework and papers, making plagiarism difficult to define; criminals are using it to develop new hacking methods to steal sensitive data for blackmail.

Artificial intelligence will also have a major impact on the way humans work. It is estimated that by 2030, 75 million to 375 million people will need to find jobs again. This will not only have an unprecedented impact on the economy, but will also cause unprecedented pressure on people's psychology. According to reports, 61% of respondents in the United States believe that artificial intelligence is threatening the future of mankind. When Jeffrey Hinton was asked "What do you think is the worst case scenario that can be imagined", he replied: "It is completely conceivable that humans are just a transitional stage in the evolution of intelligence."

A rational view of the pros and cons of the development of artificial intelligence

When more and more people begin to believe that "artificial intelligence will potentially be smarter than us," widespread concerns about the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence technology are not unreasonable. Although most of the cutting-edge artificial intelligence represented by ChatGPT still replicates and learns based on the patterns in the training data, its learning ability and growth rate can be said to be "advancing by leaps and bounds", which is not enough to describe its rapid development.

A growing number of lawmakers, advocacy groups and tech industry insiders are warning about the potential for AI chatbots to spread misinformation and replace human jobs. Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, even pointed out that the whole society should also work together to solve other types of AI risks, such as algorithm bias or misleading information. Of course, in this risk management process, it would be reckless to focus only on immediate hazards, and it would be equally reckless to ignore them. Because like other new things, the rapid popularization of artificial intelligence has opportunities and risks. While people take advantage of its benefits, they must also be wary of the possible risks. As long as you make good use of it and guard against risks, you can "use it for me".

The above is the detailed content of Gen Chen: AI gurus jointly declare 'warning of AI extermination of humankind'. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!