The 22-word statement was kept short to avoid disagreement among signatories. | Image: Alexa Steinbrück / Better Images of AI / Explainable AI / CC-BY 4.0
A group of top AI researchers, engineers, and CEOs have issued a new warning about the existential threat they believe that AI poses to humanity.
The 22-word statement, trimmed short to make it as broadly acceptable as possible, reads as follows: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
This statement, published by a San Francisco-based non-profit, the Center for AI Safety, has been co-signed by figures including Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as Geoffrey Hinton and Youshua Bengio — two of the three AI researchers who won the 2018 Turing Award (sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize of…