AI is "the most likely reason" you'll die, OpenAI board member warns
Researcher traces a path from AI reward hacking to potential human extinction.
How do you think you're going to die?
If you go by the current statistics for deaths in the US, it's reasonable to expect that cancer or heart disease will eventually get you. But OpenAI Foundation board member and Alignment Research Center Executive Director Paul Cristiano thinks we should all be worried about another major mortality risk. Speaking at a lecture series this week, Cristiano bluntly told the audience in a Toronto Convention Center, "I think for most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident."
In the opening lecture of a three-part series, Cristiano outlined his worries about the risk of an impending "AI takeover." He defined that as a situation where goal-pursuing AI systems "call the shots in the same sense that humans today call the shots and what happens on Earth" and where any human trying to stop them "would be as ineffective as if you or me was trying to stop the US military." Such a situation would likely lead to mass death and perhaps uninhabitable environments for humans, Cristiano said.
This story was first published by Ars Technica. Read the original report