AI not an immediate existential threat but ‘safety brakes’ needed: Microsoft
Global News
Microsoft's president says he doesn't think artificial intelligence poses an immediate threat to humanity's existence, but "safety brakes" are needed to address AI's risks.
Microsoft’s president says he doesn’t think artificial intelligence poses an immediate threat to humanity’s existence, but governments and businesses still need to move faster to address the technology’s risks by implementing what he calls “safety brakes.”
“We don’t see any risk in the coming years, over the next decade, that somehow AI is going to pose some kind of existential threat to humanity, but … let’s solve this problem before the problem arrives,” Brad Smith said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Smith – a stalwart of Microsoft who first joined the company in 1993 and now doubles as its vice-chair – said it’s important to get the problems posed by the technology under control so the globe doesn’t have to be “constantly worried and talking about it.”
He feels the way to address potential problems is through safety brakes, which could act like the emergency mechanisms built into elevators, school buses and high-speed trains.
They should be built into high-risk AI systems that control critical infrastructure such as electrical grids, water system and traffic.
“Let’s learn from art,” Smith said.
“Every movie in which technology imposes an existential threat ends the same way – human beings turn the technology off. (So) have an on-off switch, have a safety brake, ensure that it remains under human control. Let’s embrace that and do it now.”
The remarks from Smith come as a race to use and innovate with AI has broken out in the tech sector and beyond following the release of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot designed to generate humanlike responses to text prompts.