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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Existential risk from artificial intelligence | 7/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_intelligence | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:10:29.028395+00:00 | kb-cron |
Concern over risk from artificial intelligence has led to some high-profile donations and investments. In 2015, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Musk, and others jointly committed $1 billion to OpenAI, consisting of a for-profit corporation and the nonprofit parent company, which says it aims to champion responsible AI development. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has funded and seeded multiple labs working on AI Alignment, notably $5.5 million in 2016 to launch the Centre for Human-Compatible AI led by Professor Stuart Russell. In January 2015, Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to fund research on understanding AI decision making. The institute's goal is to "grow wisdom with which we manage" the growing power of technology. Musk also funds companies developing artificial intelligence such as DeepMind and Vicarious to "just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence, saying "I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there." In early statements on the topic, Geoffrey Hinton, a major pioneer of deep learning, noted that "there is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence", but said he continued his research because "the prospect of discovery is too sweet". In 2023 Hinton quit his job at Google in order to speak out about existential risk from AI. He explained that his increased concern was driven by concerns that superhuman AI might be closer than he previously believed, saying: "I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that." He also remarked, "Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary." In his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Toby Ord, a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, estimates the total existential risk from unaligned AI over the next 100 years at about one in ten.
=== Skepticism === Baidu Vice President Andrew Ng said in 2015 that AI existential risk is "like worrying about overpopulation on Mars when we have not even set foot on the planet yet." For the danger of uncontrolled advanced AI to be realized, the hypothetical AI may have to overpower or outthink any human, which some experts argue is a possibility far enough in the future to not be worth researching. Skeptics who believe AGI is not a short-term possibility often argue that concern about existential risk from AI is unhelpful because it could distract people from more immediate concerns about AI's impact, because it could lead to government regulation or make it more difficult to fund AI research, or because it could damage the field's reputation. AI and AI ethics researchers Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major have argued that discussion of existential risk distracts from the immediate, ongoing harms from AI taking place today, such as data theft, worker exploitation, bias, and concentration of power. They further note the association between those warning of existential risk and longtermism, which they describe as a "dangerous ideology" for its unscientific and utopian nature. Wired editor Kevin Kelly argues that natural intelligence is more nuanced than AGI proponents believe, and that intelligence alone is not enough to achieve major scientific and societal breakthroughs. He argues that intelligence consists of many dimensions that are not well understood, and that conceptions of an 'intelligence ladder' are misleading. He notes the crucial role real-world experiments play in the scientific method, and that intelligence alone is no substitute for these. Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun says that AI can be made safe via continuous and iterative refinement, similar to what happened in the past with cars or rockets, and that AI will have no desire to take control. Several skeptics emphasize the potential near-term benefits of AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes AI will "unlock a huge amount of positive things", such as curing disease and increasing the safety of autonomous cars.
=== Public surveys === An April 2023 YouGov poll of US adults found 46% of respondents were "somewhat concerned" or "very concerned" about "the possibility that AI will cause the end of the human race on Earth", compared with 40% who were "not very concerned" or "not at all concerned." According to an August 2023 survey by the Pew Research Centers, 52% of Americans felt more concerned than excited about new AI developments; nearly a third felt as equally concerned and excited. More Americans saw that AI would have a more helpful than hurtful impact on several areas, from healthcare and vehicle safety to product search and customer service. The main exception is privacy: 53% of Americans believe AI will lead to higher exposure of their personal information.
== Mitigation ==