The real reason for the scary warning about AI technology

They are 22 words that could terrify those who read them, as brutal in their simplicity as they are general in their meaning: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

- ANDREW GRIFFIN

That is the statement from San Francisco-based non-profit the Center for AI Safety, signed by chief executives from Google DeepMind and ChatGPT creators OpenAI, along with other major figures in artificial intelligence research. The fact that the statement has been signed by so many leading AI researchers and companies means that it should be heeded. But it also means that it should be robustly examined: why are they saying this, and why now? The answer might take some of the terror away (though not all of it).

Writing a statement like this functions as something like a reverse marketing campaign: our products are so powerful and so new, it says, that they could wipe out the world. Most tech products just promise to change our life; these ones could end it. And so what looks like a statement about danger is also one that highlights just how much Google, OpenAI and more think they have to offer.

Warning that AI could be as terrible as pandemics also has the peculiar effect of making the dangers of artificial intelligence seem as if they just arise naturally in the world, like the mutation of a virus. But every dangerous AI is the product of intentional choices by its developers – and in most cases, by the companies that have signed the new statement.