According to reports, Professor Tegmark was one of the signatories of a 22-word one-sentence statement released this week warning that artificial intelligence (AI) poses a risk of extinction.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction posed by artificial intelligence should be a global priority, alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement read.
MIT physicist and artificial intelligence expert Max Tegmark.
Speaking to Swedish state broadcaster SVT, Professor Tegmark said history showed that humans, the most intelligent species on Earth, were responsible for the deaths of “smaller” species such as the dodo.
He warns that if artificial intelligence becomes smarter than humans, the same fate could easily be ours.
What’s more, he says, we won’t know when we’re going to die at the hands of AI, because a less intelligent species would have no way of knowing.
Artificial intelligence might be used to create autonomous weapons or robots that can kill people.
It is reported that some of the world’s top scientists believe that in the near future, artificial intelligence may be used to create autonomous weapons or robots that can kill people, with or without human intervention.
At the same time, even seemingly benign AI software can make decisions that are deadly to humans if the technology is not programmed with care.
Back in 2018, Professor Tegmark warned that humans would one day be enslaved by the intelligent machines they create.
He even claimed at the time that some of his colleagues might welcome the extinction of species by AI, seeing them as our natural descendants.
Another view is to keep a form of “superintelligence” under human control, “like a dog in bondage.”
But Professor Tegmark warns that beyond the possible moral qualms about enslaving higher minds, we should be more concerned that perhaps superintelligence will outsmart us – and that they could “break out and take over”.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also reportedly outspoken when it comes to the power of artificial intelligence.
In March, Musk and 1,000 other technology leaders called for a moratorium on the “dangerous race” to develop artificial intelligence, which they feared would pose “profound risks to society and humanity” and could have “catastrophic” effects.
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