Special Edition: Could AI Really Kill Us?

Neil Thompson (0:00)

By catastrophic, we defined this as a million deaths or a hundred billion dollars in damages. And they thought that even when people took reasonable precautions, there was a better than 10% chance that in the next five years, we'd have that level of incident.

Erica Mandy (0:13)

Today is Saturday, September 19th. There have been some pretty alarming headlines about artificial intelligence lately, including warnings from people inside the industry who say if AI keeps advancing as quickly as it has been, the risks could eventually quote, kill us all. That can sound like science fiction, but recently we've also started seeing AI systems do things their developers did not necessarily expect. So how seriously should we take these warnings? How could AI actually cause catastrophic harm? And can the companies building it keep up with safety? Today we're joined by Dr. Neil Thompson, Director of MIT's FutureTech Research Group, and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. His team studies some of the most important trends driving progress in computing and AI, including where the technology may be headed next. So today we're talking about the real risks and asking what would actually need to happen now to keep AI's promise from becoming humanity's downfall.

Welcome to The NewsWorthy special edition Saturday, when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in less than 15 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy, it's now time for today's special edition Saturday.

Neil Thompson, thank you so much for joining us here on The NewsWorthy.

Neil Thompson (1:34)

My pleasure.

Erica Mandy (1:36)

So when people who have actually worked at these AI companies warn that this technology could eventually kill us all, as one said, how realistic do you think that actually is? And let's put it on a scale of one to ten, one being it'll never happen and ten being it's inevitable.

Neil Thompson (1:52)

I think the first thing we can say is that, is there a chance that these things can do real harm to us? Absolutely. Are they going to be able to kill us all? I think the answer is no. Right now, these systems are not at the level that they're going to be able to do something like that.

I think the worry is that the pace of improvement is so fast, and we see such remarkable capabilities emerging, that they could emerge in areas that really would be very worrisome, like bioterrorism or things like that. And of course, those are the things where suddenly, you start to worry about the scale of these dangers being enormous. We recently did some work where we asked a bunch of the experts out there, if you think about AI's ability to build things like bioweapons, what's the likelihood that that could cause a catastrophic incident? By catastrophic, we define this as a million deaths or $100 billion in damages. And they thought that even when people took reasonable precautions, there was a better than 10% chance that in the next five years, we'd have that level of incident. Thankfully, we're not at the, they can kill us all yet, but we should be worried about it because of the pace of it. And certainly in the work that we have done, where we've looked at AI capabilities, we can really see this incredible improvement that is happening year to year, that is just of a much shorter timeline than most technologies we see. And of course, that's the real challenge here. If these capabilities continue to develop as they have, we know that their ability to do science, their ability to do other things that can do lots of good in the world, but can also do harm in the world, are just going to increase.

Erica Mandy (3:26)

So you mentioned bioterrorism. Can you give us a little bit, maybe a few other examples of how that could actually happen? Like, how could AI plausibly cause catastrophic harm?

Neil Thompson (3:35)

I think bioterrorism is the one that people worry most about. The one that I think we're already starting to see the leading edge of is this ability to do cyber attacks.

So people may have heard about open AI systems hacking, hugging face without being told to do so, right? They just went on the Internet, found a way to hack into their systems, and then went in and invaded it. You can imagine that in this particular case, what they were trying to do was just sort of change some things so that they would be evaluated differently. But someone who had bad intentions could use that kind of cyber hacking ability to get into critical infrastructure. In our work that we've done with these experts, we went in to them and asked them, what about things like manipulation? We know these systems are already talking with lots of people. Unfortunately, there have been some very sad cases of people committing suicide.