Well-regulated, human and ethically-aligned AI systems are what we need
In New Delhi where the India AI Impact Summit was held last week (Feb 16-21), the AI Guru and UC Berkley Professor Stuart Russell had emphasized on the ethical and safety side of the AI systems. He said the only way world leaders could be jolted to act on the safety side of the AI development would be a disaster whose scale is similar to the Chernobyl accident.
On 26 April 1986, reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (in the erstwhile Soviet Union, now in Ukraine) exploded killing 31 people and affecting about 340,000 people. Even though direct deaths were low, its long-term impact was lethal with estimates ranging from 4,000 (UN) to over 1 lakh (Greenpeace) people affected due to cancers and other radiation-related illnesses.
Prof Russell had said:”…all the leading CEOs have admitted there’s enormous risk to humanity. Privately they will say ‘I wish I could stop’. The one person who has said publicly is Dario Amodel, the CEO of Anthropic.”
Prof Russell, who is also the president of International Association for Safe and Ethical AL, said: “I’ve heard similar things in private from other CEOs, to the point where one of them said the scenarios are so grim that the best case would be a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Because that would get governments to regulate.”
Russell made a fervent appeal to all governments across the world to recognize in advance the AI’s huge risks and protect humanity. “Look at what the risks are and set acceptable levels of risk for each type of consequence that we might be considering.”
Yann LeCun, , one of the pioneering AI researchers who had received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing”, last month warned the tech ‘herd’ would eventually hit a dead end in its development after years of work and hundreds of billions of dollars spent .
LeCun has been working on the technology for more than a decade that is now the foundation for modern AI. He also served as chief AI scientist at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
After quitting Meta last November, he has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of Silicon Valley’s relentless pursuit of building intelligent machines.
Godfather of AI and 2024 Nobel-prize winner Geoffrey Hinton had warned “people are misusing AI and there are huge risks as computers are becoming ‘super smart’.” His main mission was to warn people that AI will become more intelligent than humans. “When digital intelligence overtakes biological intelligence, it doesn’t augur well for humanity…they kept silencing me but I was trying to warn them,” the British-Canadian scientist had said.
He had suggested that a global agreement similar to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention might be a good first step toward establishing international rules against weaponized AI.
The era of ‘move fast and break things’— the longtime mantra of Silicon Valley giants—is now facing a severe challenge from the AI technology.
Leading AI experts have urged companies to take a cautious approach and warned about the risks and dangers posed by this ground-breaking technology.
Tech firms, including Google and Microsoft, are pouring billions into the AI research. Amazon has launched its own in-house AI model known as Titan.
The Adani Group in India recently announced that it would invest about $100 billion in the AI infrastructure by 2035.
“Humans are more important than money,” said Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers of AI technology. He had said he felt “lost” because of the direction that the AI is headed in.
Remember J. Robert Oppenheimer had expressed deep remorse over the destruction caused by his creation, famously telling US President Truman “I feel I have blood on my hands.” He deeply regretted the ensuing arms race, the civilian deaths in Japan and the development of more powerful hydrogen.
With the AI now in the hands of world leaders like Trump and Putin, and rapacious and mercenary companies/ tech firms, whose one and only aim is profiteering and money-making, humanity is now at the mercy of a vast and uncaring universe.
