Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have joined prominent computer scientists, economists, artists, evangelical Christian leaders and American conservative commentators Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck to call for a ban on AI \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that threatens humanity.<\/p>\n
The letter,<\/a> released Wednesday by a politically and geographically diverse group of public figures, is squarely aimed at tech giants like Google, OpenAI and Meta Platforms that are racing each other to build a form of artificial intelligence designed to surpass humans at many tasks.<\/p>\n The letter calls for a ban unless some conditions are met<\/p>\n The 30-word statement says: <\/p>\n \u201cWe call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.\u201d<\/p>\n In a preamble, the letter notes that AI tools may bring health and prosperity, but alongside those tools, \u201cmany leading AI companies have the stated goal of building superintelligence in the coming decade that can significantly outperform all humans on essentially all cognitive tasks. This has raised concerns, ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n Who signed and what they\u2019re saying about it<\/p>\n Prince Harry added in a personal note that \u201cthe future of AI should serve humanity, not replace it. I believe the true test of progress will be not how fast we move, but how wisely we steer. There is no second chance.\u201d<\/p>\n Signing alongside the Duke of Sussex was his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a ban or even a moratorium in the usual sense,\u201d wrote another signatory, Stuart Russell, an AI pioneer and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. \u201cIt\u2019s simply a proposal to require adequate safety measures for a technology that, according to its developers, has a significant chance to cause human extinction. Is that too much to ask?\u201d<\/p>\n Also signing were AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, co-winners of the Turing Award, computer science\u2019s top prize. Hinton also won a Nobel Prize<\/a> in physics last year. Both have been vocal<\/a> in bringing attention to the dangers of a technology they helped create. <\/p>\n But the list also has some surprises, including Bannon and Beck, in an attempt by the letter\u2019s organizers at the nonprofit Future of Life Institute to appeal to President Donald Trump\u2019s Make America Great Again movement even as Trump\u2019s White House staff has sought to loosen restrictions<\/a> on AI development in the U.S. <\/p>\n Also on the list are Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; British billionaire Richard Branson; the former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, who served under Republican and Democratic administrations; and Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice<\/a>, who was national security adviser to President Barack Obama. <\/p>\n Former Irish President Mary Robinson<\/a> and several British and European parliamentarians and former members of the U.S. Congress signed, as did actors Stephen Fry and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and musician will.i.am, who has otherwise embraced AI in music<\/a> creation.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, we want specific AI tools that can help cure diseases, strengthen national security, etc.,\u201d wrote Gordon-Levitt, whose wife Tasha McCauley served on OpenAI\u2019s board of directors before the upheaval that led to CEO Sam Altman\u2019s temporary ouster<\/a> in 2023. \u201cBut does AI also need to imitate humans, groom our kids, turn us all into slop junkies and make zillions of dollars serving ads? Most people don\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n Are worries about AI superintelligence also feeding AI hype?<\/p>\n The letter is likely to provoke ongoing debates within the AI research community about the likelihood of superhuman AI, the technical paths to reach it and how dangerous it could be. <\/p>\n \u201cIn the past, it\u2019s mostly been the nerds versus the nerds,\u201d said Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \u201cI feel what we\u2019re really seeing here is how the criticism has gone very mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n Complicating the broader debates is that the same companies that are striving toward what some call superintelligence<\/a> and others call artificial general intelligence, or AGI<\/a>, are also sometimes inflating the capabilities of their products, which can make them more marketable and have contributed to concerns about an AI bubble<\/a>. OpenAI was recently met with ridicule from mathematicians and AI scientists when its researcher claimed ChatGPT had figured out unsolved math problems \u2014 when what it really did was find and summarize what was already online. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a ton of stuff that\u2019s overhyped and you need to be careful as an investor, but that doesn\u2019t change the fact that \u2014 zooming out \u2014 AI has gone much faster in the last four years than most people predicted,\u201d Tegmark said.<\/p>\n Tegmark\u2019s group was also behind a March 2023 letter<\/a> \u2014 still in the dawn of a commercial AI boom<\/a> \u2014 that called on tech giants to pause the development of more powerful AI models temporarily. None of the major AI companies heeded that call. And the 2023 letter\u2019s most prominent signatory, Elon Musk, was at the same time quietly founding his own AI startup to compete with those he wanted to take a 6-month pause.<\/p>\n Asked if he reached out to Musk again this time, Tegmark said he wrote to the CEOs of all major AI developers in the U.S. but didn\u2019t expect them to sign.<\/p>\n \u201cI really empathize for them, frankly, because they\u2019re so stuck in this race to the bottom that they just feel an irresistible pressure to keep going and not get overtaken by the other guy,\u201d Tegmark said. \u201cI think that\u2019s why it\u2019s so important to stigmatize the race to superintelligence, to the point where the U.S. government just steps in.\u201d<\/p>\n Google, Meta, OpenAI and Musk\u2019s xAI didn\u2019t immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have joined prominent computer scientists, economists, artists, evangelical Christian leaders and American…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":324089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[7060,738,11744,64,69,66,57,106486,62328,59,16993,161782,7062,161780,50,55405,9342,161518,45980,923,161778,3317,161781,161517,161784,161779,161783,158,61,67,132,68,53642,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-324088","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"category-us","9":"tag-alphabet","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-barack-obama","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-elon-musk","15":"tag-general-news","16":"tag-geoffrey-hinton","17":"tag-glenn-beck","18":"tag-inc","19":"tag-joseph-gordon-levitt","20":"tag-mary-robinson","21":"tag-meta-platforms","22":"tag-mike-mullen","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-openai-inc","25":"tag-prince-harry","26":"tag-richard-branson","27":"tag-royalty","28":"tag-sam-altman","29":"tag-stephen-bannon","30":"tag-stephen-fry","31":"tag-steve-bannon","32":"tag-steve-wozniak","33":"tag-stuart-russell","34":"tag-susan-rice","35":"tag-tasha-mccauley","36":"tag-technology","37":"tag-u-s-news","38":"tag-united-states","39":"tag-unitedstates","40":"tag-us","41":"tag-will-i-am","42":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}