The false choice holding up congressional action on AI | The Hill

Earlier this year, the Future of Life Institute released an open letter calling for artificial intelligence (AI) labs to pause the development of “human competitive AI” more powerful than GPT-4 (the system that powers AI chatbot ChatGPT). The Future of Life Institute claimed that such advanced systems posed “profound risks to society and humanity” and that temporarily halting development now to institute guardrails could help prevent a doomsday. Among the letter’s 33,000 signatories were Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Andrew Yang and some of modern algorithms’ founding fathers such as Stuart Russell and John Hopfield. The idea that AI could pose existential dangers rivaling that of climate change or nuclear warfare was no longer a fringe viewpoint but a movement championed by technology’s greatest Olympians. This brand of AI safety is rooted in a philosophy called longtermism, which emphasizes ensuring the well-being of countless future generations, even in lieu of the cu

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• Sanjana Adiga