The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is out of control, in the opinion of approximately 3,000 signatories of an open letter published by business leaders and scientists.
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is out of control, in the opinion of approximately 3,000 signatories of an open letter published by business leaders and scientists.
The signatories call for a temporary halt to training especially high-performance AI systems. Prof. Urs Gasser, expert on the governance of digital technologies, examines the important questions from which the letter deflects attention, talks about why an « AI technical inspection agency » would make good sense and looks at how far the EU has come compared to the U.S. in terms of regulation.
Artificial intelligence systems capable of competing with human intelligence may entail grave risks for society and humanity, say the authors of the open letter. Therefore, they continue, for at least six months no further development should be conducted on technologies which are more powerful than the recently introduced GPT-4, successor to the language model ChatGPT.
The authors call for the introduction of safety rules in collaboration with independent experts. If AI laboratories fail to implement a development pause voluntarily, governments should legally mandate the pause, says the signatories.
Unfortunately the open letter absorbs a lot of attention which would be better devoted to other questions in the AI debate. It is correct to say that today probably nobody knows how to train extremely powerful AI systems in such a way that they will always be reliable, helpful, honest and harmless.
Nonetheless, a pause in AI training will not help achieve this, primarily because it would be impossible to assert such a moratorium on a global level, and because it would not be possible to implement the regulations called for within period of only six months. I’m convinced that what’s necessary is a stepwise further development of technologies in parallel to the application and adaptation of control mechanisms.
First of all, the open letter once again summons up the specter of what is referred to as an artificial general intelligence. That deflects attention from a balanced discussion of the risks and opportunities represented by the kind of technologies currently entering the market.
