Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender
The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals Amid a barrage of news stories warning about superintelligent machines rendering humanity extinct, a CNN story describing the opposite scenario – one in which the US military’s reliance on brittle chatbots almost brought the US into war with China – went mostly unnoticed by the…
Recent security incident between China and the United States has revealed that AI risks aren't what we think they are. While news stories warn about superintelligent machines ending humanity, a CNN story about a more domestic threat went largely unnoticed. The US military's dependence on unreliable chatbots almost led to a global conflict with China.
This story received little public attention compared to the publicized resignation of Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon. Coxon claimed that OpenAI and Anthropic are "racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives". His depiction of a "terminator" scenario - a machine vastly smarter than humans and deciding to eradicate us - captured public, journalist, and political imagination, leading to a surge of fear-inducing reporting and policy actions.
Timnit Gebru, executive director of Dair and author of forthcoming book Deep Unlearning, and Emily M Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, shed light on this lesser-known but potentially devastating AI threat.
Written by urgent.news from The Guardian US's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
