According to the July 22 front-page article “Top firms pledge to monitor AI risks,” rapid advances in artificial intelligence have stunned President Biden: “That has been an astounding revelation to me, quite frankly.”
About 350 executives, engineers and researchers, all working on artificial intelligence technologies, recently signed this statement from the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
I was reminded of the 1964 film “Fail Safe,” in which a technical malfunction sends American nuclear-armed bombers to attack the Soviet Union. Over the hotline, the U.S. president and the Soviet premier try desperately to fix the mistake. They cannot. Millions die. The president tells the Soviet leader: “We are to blame. Both of us. We let our machines get out of hand.”
That was fiction. The reality of the artificial intelligence threat facing us today is not. As Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, put it: “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”
More aggressive, mandatory regulations to mitigate the safety and security risks of AI — building on the voluntary pledge announced by the White House — must be pursued.
Karl F. Inderfurth, McLean
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