Richard Branson believes the environmental prices of area journey will “come down even further.”
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Dozens of high-profile figures in enterprise and politics are calling on world leaders to handle the existential dangers of synthetic intelligence and the local weather disaster.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, together with former United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, and Charles Oppenheimer — the grandson of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer — signed an open letter urging motion towards the escalating risks of the local weather disaster, pandemics, nuclear weapons, and ungoverned AI.
The message asks world leaders to embrace long-view technique and a “determination to resolve intractable problems, not just manage them, the wisdom to make decisions based on scientific evidence and reason, and the humility to listen to all those affected.”
Signatories known as for pressing multilateral motion, together with via financing the transition away from fossil fuels, signing an equitable pandemic treaty, restarting nuclear arms talks, and constructing world governance wanted to make AI a drive for good.
The letter was launched on Thursday by The Elders, a nongovernmental group that was launched by former South African President Nelson Mandela and Branson to handle world human rights points and advocate for world peace.
The message can be backed by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit group arrange by MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, which goals to steer transformative expertise like AI in direction of benefiting life and away from large-scale dangers.
Tegmark mentioned that The Elders and his group wished to convey that, whereas not in and of itself “evil,” the expertise stays a “tool” that might result in some dire penalties, whether it is left to advance quickly within the palms of the incorrect individuals.
“The old strategy for steering toward good uses [when it comes to new technology] has always been learning from mistakes,” Tegmark informed CNBC in an interview. “We invented fire, then later we invented the fire extinguisher. We invented the car, then we learned from our mistakes and invented the seatbelt and the traffic lights and speed limits.”
‘Safety engineering’
“But when the thing already crosses the threshold and power, that learning from mistakes strategy becomes … well, the mistakes would be awful,” Tegmark added.
“As a nerd myself, I think of it as safety engineering. We send people to the moon, we very carefully thought through all the things that could go wrong when you put people in explosive fuel tanks and send them somewhere where no one can help them. And that’s why it ultimately went well.”
He went on to say, “That wasn’t ‘doomerism.’ That was safety engineering. And we need this kind of safety engineering for our future also, with nuclear weapons, with synthetic biology, with ever more powerful AI.”
The letter was issued forward of the Munich Security Conference, the place authorities officers, navy leaders and diplomats will focus on worldwide safety amid escalating world armed conflicts, together with the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars. Tegmark shall be attending the occasion to advocate the message of the letter.
The Future of Life Institute final 12 months additionally launched an open letter backed by main figures together with Tesla boss Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, which known as on AI labs like OpenAI to pause work on coaching AI fashions which might be extra highly effective than GPT-4 — at present essentially the most superior AI mannequin from Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
The technologists known as for such a pause in AI improvement to keep away from a “loss of control” of civilization, which could end in a mass wipe-out of jobs and an outsmarting of people by computer systems.
Source: www.cnbc.com”