Could AI kill us all? Inside Google DeepMind, the world’s biggest AI company
Everyone laughed politely when I asked whether AI might, in the end, kill us all — everyone apart from one researcher from a US-based thinktank who told me that, as a pessimist, he believes there is about a “20 per cent chance that AI poses an existential threat to life.”
“That’s a smaller percentage than you used to say,” an eminent professor from Stanford University quipped, “outlooks have improved?”
“Well, just as long as people are afraid, fear is healthy."
The night before November’s AI Safety Summit was due to take place at Bletchley Park I was invited to a drinks event hosted by Google DeepMind, one of the world’s largest and most influential AI companies. Headquartered in London since its inception as DeepMind in 2010 and founded by two Londoners (Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman) and a Kiwi (Shane Legg), the start-up was acquired by Google in 2014 and over the past fifteen years has been at the forefront of an AI revolution that — depending on which side you land on — could solve the climate crisis and cure all cancers or achieve God-like super intelligence and kill us all in ways we’ve yet to dream possible.
We're in a long term mission to develop ever more general, more capable AI technology through research and you've got to take a long term view to do that
In the 24 hours leading up to the Summit, world leaders — including US vice president — and tech titans like , had flown into London for two days of intensive talks about how to keep the world safe in this era of transformational tech. A week before that had made a speech in which he warned that, “mitigating
