Anthropic’s chief scientist Jared Kaplan says humanity will soon have a big decision to make on whether to take the „ultimate risk“ on AI.
Anthropic’s chief scientist Jared Kaplan is making some grave predictions about humanity’s future with AI.
The choice is ours, in his framing. For now, our fates are mostly in our hands, according to Kaplan — unless we decide to pass the proverbial baton to the machines, that is.
Such a point is fast approaching, he says in a new interview with The Guardian. By 2030, Kaplan predicts, or as soon as 2027, humanity will have to decide whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting AI models train themselves. The ensuing “intelligence explosion” could elevate the tech to new heights, birthing a so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) which equals or surpasses human intellect and benefits humankind with all sorts of scientific and medical advancements. Or it could allow AI’s power to snowball beyond our control, leaving us at the mercy of its whims.
“It sounds like a kind of scary process,” he told the newspaper. “You don’t know where you end up.”
Kaplan is one of many prominent figures in AI warning about the field’s potentially disastrous consequences. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the three so-called godfathers of AI, famously declared he regretted his life’s work, and has frequently warned about how AI could upend or even destroy society. OpenAI Sam Altman predicts that AI will will wipe out entire categories of labor.
