WORLD leaders have TWO YEARS left to tame Artificial Intelligence before humans are unable to control powerful computers, a government top adviser says.
Tech entrepreneur Matt Clifford, the Prime Minister’s AI Task Force adviser, calls for urgent measures to regulate their capabilities – before a bio-weapon is developed that could kill many humans.
World leaders have just two years left to tame AI before humanity risks losing control, a government adviser has warned
The warning comes a day before Rishi Sunak heads to Washington DC to discuss the matter with US President Joe Biden – amid speculation the UK could be home to a global regulator.
Only last week a letter was signed by 350 AI experts saying it needed to be treated as an existential threat to society similar to a pandemic or nuclear weapons.
Clifford, in an interview with Talk TV tonight, said: “I think what the signers of the letter are saying is we’re on an exponential like these systems are getting more and more capable at an ever increasing rate.
“And if we don’t start to think now about how to regulate, how to think about safety, then in two years time, we’ll be finding that we have systems that are very powerful indeed.”
Senior bosses from Google, DeepMind, OPENAI who said the risks from AI should be treated as a “global priority” as it could wipe out humanity.
The call comes after Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk expressed his concerns that “Terminator” style robots could kill off “many, many people”.
Clifford, who chairs the government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, said the world was at a ‘tipping point’ with even the short term risks being “pretty scary”.
Speaking to the First Edition show, Clifford said: “It’s certainly true that if we try and create artificial intelligence that is more intelligent than humans and we don’t know how to control it, then that’s going to create a potential for all sorts of risks now and in the future.
“So I think there’s lots of different scenarios to worry about but I certainly think it’s right that it should be very high on the policy maker’s agendas.”
He told host Tom Newton Dunn that the risk was “not zero” that AI becomes so clever that they turn on humans even though it sounds “like the plot of a movie”, he added.
Clifford added: “I think rising capability is very striking. But also if we go back to things like the bio weapons or the cyber, you can have really very dangerous threats to humans that could kill many humans, not all humans, simply from where we’d expect models to be in two years time.”
He even said that signatories to the letter “freely admit” they don’t understand the machines exhibit the behaviours they do which he described as “quite terrifying”.
Rishi Sunak spoke last month about the “existential threat” from technology as he discussed possible regulation with industry bosses.
First Edition with Tom Newton Dunn is available on TalkTV at 10pm.
