Article by Nitasha Tiku: “At a beachfront resort in San Juan, Puerto Rico, SpaceX founder Elon Musk joined a three-hour discussion on humanity’s dire fate if artificial intelligence started to rapidly improve.
The afternoon panel was part of a private conference hosted in early 2015 by the Future of Life Institute, a new nonprofit whose founders — mostly outsiders to AI — believed the nascent technology would grow so powerful it could render humans extinct.
The first presenter was Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, author of the recent bestseller “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” whose slides argued that AI could either help humanity spread across the cosmos or drive it to extinction.
The 80-person guest list was filled with bold-faced names, including the co-founders of DeepMind, acquired by Google the year before, and three future co-founders of OpenAI including Musk, who backed the nonprofit research lab’s launch later that year.
The conference aimed to legitimize concerns about AI’s risks within the industry and spur research into preventing them, physicist and Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark wrote in his book “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The elite gathering made it “harder to claim that people concerned about AI safety didn’t know what they were talking about,” he wrote.
Predictions involving human extinction, built on themes aired at the 2015 meeting, reached a wider audience in recent weeks after they were invoked by employees at leading AI firms who captured the world’s attention.
On Tuesday, the Future of Life Institute hosted a day-long event in Washington called the Pro-Human Assembly where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in successive speeches called AI a threat to the species. “I had to metaphorically pinch my arm to make sure I wasn’t dreaming,” Tegmark told The Washington Post. “People are freaking out about it all across the political spectrum.”
Thought experiments once deployed to sway AI insiders are now shaping the public imagination, circulating through Washington and influencing how lawmakers plan to govern a multitrillion-dollar industry. But some AI and policy experts wonder if the parables could lead decision-makers astray…(More)”.
