To Fear Al, or Not, That Is the Question

Even those who are freaked out disagree about what makes the technology so threatening

- Joshua Brustein

In January 2015 the newly formed-and grandly named Future of Life Institute (FLI) invited experts in artificial intelligence to spend a long weekend in San Juan, Puerto Rico, laying out a written agenda for the field. The tone of the resulting documents was predominantly upbeat. An open letter acknowledged it was hard to predict what AI's exact impact would be-it laid out some potentially disruptive consequences-but also noted that "the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable."

The open letter the FLI published on March 29 was, well, different. The group warned that Al labs were engaging in "an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one-not even their creators-can understand, predict, or reliably control." It called for an immediate pause on the most advanced AI research and attracted thousands of signatures-including those of many prominent figures in the field-as well as a round of mainstream press coverage.

For anyone trying to wrap their heads around the current freakout over AI, the letter was instructive on multiple levels. It's a vivid example of how the conversations about advanced technologies can shift with jarring speed. The vibe in Puerto Rico in 2015 was positive and collegial, says Anthony Aguirre, the FLI's vice president and secretary of its board, who attended that conference and helped draft the recent letter. "What there wasn't then was giant companies competing with one another," he says.

Looking back, the risk that self-interested technology companies would come to dominate the field seems obvious. But that concern isn't reflected anywhere in the documents from 2015. Also absent was any mention of the industrial-scale dissemination of misinformation, an issue that many tech experts now see as one of the most frightening consequences of powerful chatbots in the near term.