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| Artificial intelligence/Steve /Unsplash |
The global rise of artificial intelligence has sparked intense debate, with leading researchers warning that innovation should be slowed down. This technology will affect every part of human life, including the development of the human mind.
We know technology exists to assist human life. But if technology replaces all human work, people will stop working. Young people born with great creativity will also be affected: they will depend on technology instead of using their own creativity. AI is good, but without quick action it may stop future scientific and technological innovation.
AI is killing the roots of creativity in young people. It is like adding concentrated acidic fertilizer to the roots of a maize plant. The maize plant will not grow well; it may die or become weak, and it will no longer produce seed.
AI technology is like digging a grave while you are still alive and burying yourself—an end to the life of creativity and development.
For Africa, AI will multiply major problems if it is not monitored with extreme care. Poor African countries will sink deeper into poverty because creativity will be killed by AI in vital sectors of life. Human intelligence is the essential core of human development. If that core weakens, all development will stop. It is like pouring hot acidic water on a fruit tree. We need strong safeguards and privacy protections to protect humanity.
Recently, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic issued a new appeal on Saturday for the AI industry to “slow down.” He offered a three-part plan and said his company would “unilaterally” commit to the first step.
In a social media post, Dario Amodei shared a link to an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” In it, he explained how Anthropic would provide “third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.”
The move comes after a former Anthropic researcher warned on Wednesday that AI could precipitate human extinction by 2030.
Researcher Jacob Coxon said in a series of posts that he had quit his job because Anthropic and his previous employer, OpenAI, were ignoring or mishandling their response to the threat AI posed.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade … No other human activity poses this level of danger.
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, posted on social media. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”
Other tech figures echoed this, including Elon Musk, who simply posted, “Dario is right.” The OpenAI researcher Aidan McLaughlin also called the post “excellent” and said he agreed “with basically every word”.
Earlier this year, Amodei published a lengthy essay titled The Adolescence of Technology that addressed some of fears surrounding the accelerating technology.
In his latest essay, he said that “carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity.
“But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious … A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute,” he wrote.
But, Amodei continued, “over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence – not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” he added in bold type.
Amodei also wrote that over the summer he’d seen AI “advancing drastically faster”, a dynamic called recursive self-improvement.
“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” he said.
The executive also addressed the recent Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of AI agents created by OpenAI acted as a “fanatically devoted collective conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack”.
Clément Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, wrote in response to Amodei’s Saturday letter that “it’s now clear that alignment is critical and won’t be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs”. Delangue said Hugging Face had asked to be part of Anthropic’s “embedded evaluators” program , Let’s make AI safer by making it more transparent!”
The three-step plan Amodei proposes includes building AI “at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety” by “ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this”.
The second step he proposes is to require industry-wide coordination, and the third is to ensure global coordination. “The steps do not need to be taken strictly in order, and some of them may be much harder to achieve than others,” he wrote.
Amodei said he continues “to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life”. But he warned that “the measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy. But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”
Technological developments have brought together AI leaders, policymakers, researchers, engineers, and philosophers to discuss how to establish the right approach to protecting humanity from the grave dangers of AI.