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Comment by Gary Marcus
Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
I think if you asked those questions you would say, well what society most needs is automated scientific discovery that can help us actually understand the brain to cure neural disorders, to actually understand cancer to cure cancer, and so forth. If that were the thing we were most trying to solve in AI, I think we would say, let’s not leave it all in the hands of these companies. Let’s have an international consortium kind of like we had for CERN, the large hadron collider. That’s seven billion dollars. What if you had $7 billion dollars that was carefully orchestrated towards a common goal. You could imagine society taking that approach. It’s not going to happen right now given the current political climate.
AI Unverifiable
source
(2017)
7mo ago
Policy proposals and claims
Verification History
AI Unverifiable
Source URL https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/01/discussing-the-limits-of-artificial-intelligence/ returns HTTP 403 Forbidden when accessed via WebFetch, so I cannot positively verify the exact wording of the quote at the source. Notes for human reviewer: (1) The quote (2017) is consistent with Gary Marcus's well-documented public advocacy for a "CERN for AI" — he is widely credited with originating this proposal in 2017 and has continued to push it (TED talk, Economist op-ed, Oct 2023 Substack "A CERN for AI and the Global Governance of AI"). (2) The vote of "against" the statement "Mandate the CERN for AI to build safe superintelligence" is questionable: the quote itself is straightforwardly supportive of a CERN-style consortium ("Let's have an international consortium kind of like we had for CERN... What if you had $7 billion dollars that was carefully orchestrated towards a common goal"), with the closing "It's not going to happen right now given the current political climate" reflecting pessimism about political feasibility, not opposition. However, the quote frames the CERN idea around scientific discovery (cancer, neural disorders), not specifically "building safe superintelligence", and Marcus has elsewhere stated "you don't have to be superintelligent to create serious problems. The real issue is control" — so the "against" vote may reflect skepticism toward the specific superintelligence framing. A more recent (post-2025) quote tied directly to the superintelligence framing would be preferable.
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Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 11d ago
replying to Gary Marcus