“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”
– An Open Letter to all Artificial Intelligence Labs, Future of Life Institute.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
An array of prominent tech leaders, from CEOs to professors and research scientists, have signed an open letter calling on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4…” And, "… if such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
Signatories include Elon Musk; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio; Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque; co-author of the standard college textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach" Stuart Russell; politician Andrew Yang, among 1409 others at the time of this publication.