AI ‘Godfathers’: Tech Development ‘Utterly Reckless’ Without Checks

STOCKHOLM (Guardian) -- Powerful artificial intelligence systems threaten social stability and AI companies must be made liable for harms caused by their products, a group of senior experts including two “godfathers” of the technology has warned.

Tuesday’s intervention was made as international politicians, tech companies, academics and civil society figures prepare to gather at Bletchley Park next week for a summit on AI safety.
A co-author of the policy proposals from 23 experts said it was “utterly reckless” to pursue ever more powerful AI systems before understanding how to make them safe.
“It’s time to get serious about advanced AI systems,” said Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless.”
He added: “There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies.”
The document urged governments to adopt a range of policies, including:
Other co-authors of the document include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three “godfathers of AI”, who won the ACM Turing award – the computer science equivalent of the Nobel prize – in 2018 for their work on AI.
Both are among the 100 guests invited to attend the summit. Hinton resigned from Google this year to sound a warning about what he called the “existential risk” posed by digital intelligence while Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, joined him and thousands of other experts in signing a letter in March calling for a moratorium in giant AI experiments.
Other co-authors of the proposals include the bestselling author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Sheila McIlraith, a professor in AI at the University of Toronto, as well as award-winning Chinese computer scientist Andy Yao.