Google DeepMind Chief Calling for AI Regulation, Taking Risks as Serious as Climate Change

Demis Hassabis

Aw, shit boy.

AI be all like, the climate change?

I ain’t even know it be like that, son.

The Guardian:

The world must treat the risks from artificial intelligence as seriously as the climate crisis and cannot afford to delay its response, one of the technology’s leading figures has warned.

Speaking as the UK government prepares to host a summit on AI safety, Demis Hassabis said oversight of the industry could start with a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Hassabis, the British chief executive of Google’s AI unit, said the world must act immediately in tackling the technology’s dangers, which included aiding the creation of bioweapons and the existential threat posed by super-intelligent systems.

We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, like climate change,” he said. “It took the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response to this, and we’re living with the consequences of that now. We can’t afford the same delay with AI.”

Hassabis, whose unit created the revolutionary AlphaFold program that depicts protein structures, said AI could be “one of the most important and beneficial technologies ever invented”.

However, he told the Guardian a regime of oversight was needed and governments should take inspiration from international structures such as the IPCC.

“I think we have to start with something like the IPCC, where it’s a scientific and research agreement with reports, and then build up from there.”

He added: “Then what I’d like to see eventually is an equivalent of a Cern for AI safety that does research into that – but internationally. And then maybe there’s some kind of equivalent one day of the IAEA, which actually audits these things.”

The government doesn’t have the authority to regulate AI. Basically no one trusts the government enough to do that in the Western world. The actual proposition of it sounds preposterous – “like, you mean, the same governments that are producing war and mass death everywhere? Or like the UN, which can’t get water into Gaza?”

Basically, AI is just something you’re going to have to deal with. You won’t know what is real, at all. Any video you see, any phone conversation you have – you are never going to know if any of it is real.

This is pretty much a “now” crisis, actually. I guess it’s technically “near future,” but like – “next year or the year after.”

So, I mean.

No one is going to stop it.

It’s already happened.