Letters to the Editor: Merely monitoring AI development is a ‘woefully inadequate’ safeguard

To the editor: Guest contributors Dov Greenbaum and Mark Gerstein acknowledge that artificial intelligence presents possible dangers to society, but their prescription — monitoring, like that required of the pharmaceutical industry — is woefully inadequate (“Can AI developers avoid Frankenstein’s fateful mistake?” Nov. 15).

Unlike all previous technological advances, AI is not just another tool for humans to utilize. AI developers, along with those in robotics, are competing to create ever more powerful entities whose capabilities vastly surpass our own in both physical manipulation and mental calculation. Whether or not AIs have or will achieve “consciousness,” they have already demonstrated the ability to act on their own, reason in unforeseen ways, use subterfuge and resist being turned off.

Two years ago, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 other experts signed an open letter calling for a six-month halt on the development of any AI technology more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. They were concerned about the possibility of “profound risks to society and humanity.” They said, “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” The requested pause did not occur, of course.

We are a strange species. Our “leaders” have been complicit in allowing profit to come before the protection of the Earth’s climate. Now, with AI, they are allowing profit to come before ensuring that AI doesn’t endanger the whole human project.

Grace Bertalot, Anaheim