Can we hope to restrain the five horsemen of an Al apocalypse?

The possibility of an AI-led dystopian future spells the need for global guardrails but with all major AI powers on board

- SUDIPTO MUNDLE

Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk—a recent Economist article describes them as the small, powerful group of five men who will determine the path along which artificial intelligence (AI) evolves.

Their fellow AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who invented the neural network system that enables AI models to learn like humans, quit Google in 2023 to alert the world that while further development of AI could lead us to a utopian future, it could equally lead us to a dystopian one. Since then, a debate has raged over which way AI is taking us. This is an open question. But the fact that a dystopian future is even a possible scenario requires the world to establish guardrails to protect itself against the ambitions of these horsemen of an AI apocalypse. That points us to another question: whether competition among AI innovators will drive us towards an apocalypse, and if so, what can be done to preempt it. That question has to be asked in the context of global geopolitics, in particular the intense competition for hegemony between the US and China.