AI poses 'extinction-level' threat and US government must be given new 'emergency powers' to control technology, warns State Department report

AI poses 'extinction-level' threat and US government must be given new 'emergency powers' to control technology, warns State Department report

MATTHEW PHELAN SENIOR SCIENCE REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

A new US State Department-funded study calls for a temporary ban on the creation of advanced AI passed a certain threshold of computational power. 

The tech, its authors claim, poses an 'extinction-level threat to the human species.' 

The study, commissioned as part of a $250,000 federal contract, also calls for 'defining emergency powers' for the American government's executive branch 'to respond to dangerous and fast-moving AI-related incidents' — like 'swarm robotics.'

Treating high-end computer chips as international contraband, and even monitoring how hardware is used, are just some of the drastic measures the new study calls for. 

The report joins of a chorus of industry, governmental and academic voices calling for aggressive regulatory attention on the hotly pursued and game-changing, but socially disruptive, potential of artificial intelligence. 

Last July, the United Nation's agency for science and culture (UNESCO), for example paired its AI concerns with equally futuristic worries over brain chip tech, a la Elon Musk's Neuralink, warning of 'neurosurveillance' violating 'mental privacy.'

Gladstone AI's report floats a dystopian scenario that the machines may decide for themselves that humanity is an enemy to be eradicated, a la the Terminator films: 'if they are developed using current techniques, [AI] could behave adversarially to human beings by default'

While the new report notes upfront, on its first page, that its recommendations 'do not reflect the views of the United States Department of State or the United States Government,' its authors have been briefing the government on AI since 2021.

The study authors, a four-person AI consultancy called firm Gladstone AI run by brothers Jérémie and Edouard Harris, told TIME that their earlier presentations on AI risks frequently were heard by government officials with no authority to act. 

That's changed with the US State Department, they told the magazine, because its Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation is specifically tasked with curbing the spread of cataclysmic new weapons.

And the Gladstone AI report devotes considerable attention to 'weaponization risk.'

An offensive, advanced AI, they write, 'could potentially be used to design and even execute catastrophic biological, chemical, or cyber attacks, or enable unprecedented weaponized applications in swarm robotics.'

But the report floats a second, even more dystopian scenario, which they describe as a 'loss of control' AI risk. 

There is, they write, 'reason to believe that they [weaponized AI] may be uncontrollable if they are developed using current techniques, and could behave adversarially to human beings by default.' 

In other words, the machines may decide for themselves that humanity (or some subset of humanity) is simply an enemy to be eradicated for good. 

Gladstone AI's CEO, Jérémie Harris, also presented similarly grave scenarios before hearings held by the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology within Canada's House of Commons last year, on December 5, 2023.

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