Recently, renowned figures in the sector of artificial intelligence (AI), similar to Elon Musk and Jeffrey Hinton, have been emphasizing the ‘existential danger to mankind’ attributable to AI one after one other.

About 350 experts, including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Jeffrey Hinton, professor on the University of Toronto, who is known as the AI ​​godfather, Yoshua Bengio, professor on the University of Montreal, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, issued a joint statement on the thirtieth (local time) about AI risks. urged management.

In an announcement, they said, “Mitigating the danger of extinction attributable to AI have to be a world priority,” referring to the “existential risk to humanity” and emphasizing that the danger of AI is the same as the danger of a corona pandemic or nuclear war.

Nevertheless, on this regard, Enterprise Beat reported on the thirty first that there’s a counterargument coming from the AI ​​community that they will not be very concerned about ‘X-risk (existential risk attributable to artificial intelligence)’.

Sarah Hooker, a former Google Brain research scientist, said that X-risk was treated as if it were the dominant view of AI technology, but earlier last month at ICLR, a world conference of AI researchers from around the globe, X-risk was a “sub-mainstream topic.”

“Among the researchers who spoke about existential risk on the conference felt unnoticed because they were within the minority,” he said.

Mark Riddle, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, said the words of distinguished researchers and tech giant leaders appear to get undue attention on social media and within the media. This, he criticized, “spreads the assumption that only the scenario wherein your entire human civilization is in danger is an issue and that other damages are insignificant.”

Researcher Yasin Genite Hugging Face identified in a Twitter post that the recent recurring discourse of X-risk is sort of a DDoS attack. He points out that a lot attention has been focused on the X-risk that there’s a subtle societal pressure on researchers to give attention to more pressing issues or other risks.

Timnit Gebru, former ethics team leader who was fired after criticizing the corporate’s unethical policies at Google, sympathized with the purpose on Twitter that the X-risk discourse was like a DDoS attack, saying, “Millionaire white men are anxious about this.” wrote that

Critics argue that the X-risk discourse needs to be restrained since it overemphasizes the risks of AI and has the side effect of neglecting real problems similar to climate change, the spread of AI in digitally underserved regions, hallucinations, and the spread of pretend information. .

Reporter Jeong Byeong-il jbi@aitimes.com