Comment by Jérémie Harris

It’s clear that we’ve taken some significant steps towards human-level AI — in the last three years in particular. So much so that we have many of the world’s top AI researchers, including two out of three of its earliest pioneers, wondering aloud about it. I might not go that far, personally, but this is being talked about through that lens. By throwing more data and processing power at these techniques, we might be able to achieve something like human-level or even superhuman AI. If that is even a ballpark possibility, we need to contemplate some fairly radical shifts in the risk landscape that society is exposed to by this technology. There are many dimensions to consider, but a key one is malicious use. As these systems become more powerful, the destructive footprint of malicious actors that use them will only grow. We’ve already seen, for example, China using powerful AI systems to interfere in Taiwan’s electoral process. We’ve seen cybersecurity breaches and malware being generated by people who don’t even know how to code. Then, of course, there’s the risk of catastrophic AI accidents, which folks like Geoff Hinton are flagging. Those two broad categories of risk are very significant.