After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters are answering your questions on the reality of the AI threat live now Virtualewit asks: Throughout history new technological advances have met with cries of doom. Are the cries against AI any different? Blake: The end times-quality of doomsday predictions may be similar across history, but I think the reason we listen to the renewed cries of doom is the growing power of each technology. Artificial intelligence can perform impressive tasks we didn’t think were possible, which has spurred our collective imagination to hopeful outcomes and ones of doom. Let’s back up a bit here. It’s always possible to advance any technology, no matter what - so regulation isn’t going to stop Yan LeCunn theorizing about neurosymbolic AI on X, for example. But what it sounds like you’re wondering about is whether regulation can stop the emergence of some kind of superintelligence that destroys humanity. Our reporting does not support the idea that superintelligence is going to emerge and pave over the Earth with datacentres. In fact, we have found that the industry itself seems to be playing loosely with this kind of terminology: consider, for example, how one OpenAI executive, Greg Brockman, claimed that the company had achieved AGI (artificial general intelligence) just days after Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said that term was “an irrelevant marketing term.” Right now, a number of industry warnings about out-of-control AI appear to be predicated on a limited number of incidents with cherry-picked details. Continue reading...