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The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp\u00a0increase in anxiety about AI<\/a>. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed \u201cP(doom)<\/a>,\u201d about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.<\/p>\n Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released\u00a0a one-sentence statement<\/a>: \u201cMitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.\u201d The statement was signed by many key players in the field, including the leaders of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as two of the so-called \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI:\u00a0Geoffrey Hinton<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Yoshua Bengio<\/a>.<\/p>\n You might ask how such existential fears are supposed to play out. One famous scenario is the \u201cpaper clip maximizer<\/a>\u201d thought experiment articulated by Oxford philosopher\u00a0Nick Bostrom<\/a>. The idea is that an AI system tasked with producing as many paper clips as possible might go to extraordinary lengths to find raw materials, like destroying factories and causing car accidents.<\/p>\n A\u00a0less resource-intensive variation<\/a>\u00a0has an AI tasked with procuring a reservation to a popular restaurant shutting down cellular networks and traffic lights in order to prevent other patrons from getting a table.<\/p>\n Office supplies or dinner, the basic idea is the same: AI is fast becoming an alien intelligence, good at accomplishing goals but dangerous because it won\u2019t necessarily align with the moral values of its creators. And, in its most extreme version, this argument morphs into explicit anxieties about AIs\u00a0enslaving or destroying the human race<\/a>.
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