AI godfathers, Wozniak sign pledge to ban unchecked superintelligence – Musk, Altman, and Zuck are MIA
AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are calling on the world’s most influential power players to sign a statement supporting a pause on the development of superintelligence.
Hosted by the US-based global non-profit Future of Life Institute (FLI), the “Statement on Superintelligence” was released publicly on Wednesday.
The pledge states:
“We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is:
- broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and
- strong public buy-in."
The document has already garnered support from big names such as Apple’s Steve Wozniak, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, Ireland’s former President Mary Robinson, Andre Hoffman, co-chair of the World Economic Forum, and even Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle.
"Frontier AI systems could surpass most individuals across most cognitive tasks within just a few years. These advances could unlock solutions to major global challenges, but they also carry significant risks,” warns Yoshua Bengio, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montreal/Mila, Turing Laureate and world's most cited scientist.
“To safely advance toward superintelligence, we must scientifically determine how to design AI systems that are fundamentally incapable of harming people, whether through misalignment or malicious use. We also need to make sure the public has a much stronger say in decisions that will shape our collective future,” the AI godfather said.
Only 5% of Americans support unregulated AI development
Founded in 2014, FIL has been raising concerns about the risks posed to humans from the unchecked development of intelligent machines for over a decade.
By Wednesday evening, more than 21,000 signatories had lent their names to the missive posted on the FIL website, while close to another 20,000 had signed onto the pledge through Ekō, a DC-based social welfare non-profit known for its slogan People and Planet over Profit.
Ironically, Elon Musk, an early supporter of the Institute who has voiced his own concerns about superintelligence and the threat to human life as we know it, has not yet signed the statement. Neither has Meta's Mark Zuckerberg nor OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, although a quote from Altman appears under a section titled "Public statements by non-signatories."
Altman’s name appears alongside other past quotes from missing tech signatories, including the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei who has been quoted, “I think there’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly,” as well as a statement from CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman, “Until we can prove unequivocally that it is [safe], we shouldn’t be inventing it.”
The Institute further shares the latest public sentiment on the issue, taken from a new national survey taken only weeks ago, “to uncover where Americans stand on AI and the prospect of expert‑level and superhuman systems.”
According to the results, nearly two-thirds of Americans want robust regulation on advanced AI, with more than 60% believing that the development of superhuman AI should not continue until proven safe or controllable. Only 5% of Americans agree with the current system of unregulated AI development.
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