{"id":631477,"date":"2026-09-21T14:30:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T14:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/631477\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T14:30:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T14:30:16","slug":"i-told-you-so-will-be-too-late-when-it-comes-to-ai-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/631477\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I told you so\u2019 will be too late when it comes to AI \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leading figures in the artificial intelligence (AI<\/a>) industry are calling for a slowdown in the rate of innovation. A researcher resigned from Anthropic<\/a>, arguing that \u201cthe people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei himself has written that \u201cwe must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models\u201d. OpenAI<\/a>\u2019s Sam Altman<\/a> and Elon Musk<\/a> then swiftly supported him.<\/p>\n

We should all do so. When risks are unknown, perhaps huge, and also hard to contain, that is rational. The question, rather, is how to do it effectively. That is going to be hard, practically and politically. But we have to start thinking.<\/p>\n

Amodei points to two big concerns: his first \u201cis that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI\u2019s growing ability to build the next generation of AI. This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement … Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all\u201d.<\/p>\n

His second concern \u201cis the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack\u201d. This is scary enough, but it misses what AI might do in response to actual prompts from rogue humans, a point Bill Gates makes in his own recent post on the perils (and promise) of AI.<\/p>\n

Cynics naturally (and reasonably) ask what lies behind these requests from leaders in the industry. One possibility is that they just want to slow the hugely costly race they are engaged in.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Will AI kill us all?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Another is that they hope to create a cosy cartel, with captured regulators, and so dominate the industry even more securely. <\/p>\n

A third is that they just wish to forestall outside regulation. Or maybe they want to emphasise their importance for national security. These suspicions are natural. Nevertheless, other industries with the capacity to inflict huge damage, such as banking, drug manufacture and nuclear energy, are, rightly, regulated.<\/p>\n

\"\"Soaring energy costs and why \u2018we can\u2019t protect everyone from the impact of war\u2019<\/p>\n

Amodei himself suggests three steps: first, \u201cembedded evaluators … whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes\u201d; second, \u201cdemocratic co-ordination\u201d, in which leading companies would be allowed to work together \u201cto establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress\u201d; and, third, \u201cglobal co-ordination\u201d, in which democratic governments try to work \u201cwith authoritarian governments … while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Donald Trump says attempts to limit artificial intelligence are part of \u2018sick conspiracy\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

These suggestions will strengthen the suspicions I have noted. Those worried by ulterior motives might be pleased by US President Donald Trump\u2019s entirely predictable indifference to the risks. The president has instead stressed US competition with China. <\/p>\n

Yet Amodei\u2019s suggestions are also targeted at the two biggest obstacles to a better-considered approach to AI development: intercorporate and international competition. We do not need to fear extinction: a takeover of large parts of the internet by swarms of rogue agents would surely be bad enough.<\/p>\n

Wiser people than Trump (who, after all, is not?), such as former Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, took a very different position in an article for The Washington Post earlier in September. They, too, focus not on the wider (and legitimate) concerns about jobs, income distribution and the future of democracy, but on safety.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Gambling with our lives\u2019: How talk in AI companies is increasingly turning to doomsdayOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet this month,\u201d they wrote, \u201cwe encourage the leaders to … work toward an \u2018ACT\u2019\u201d \u2013 or AI Cooperation Treaty. They also suggest the creation of a president\u2019s working group on AI, similar to the \u201cworking group on financial markets\u201d, which has proved \u201can effective way to convene the private sector, particularly competitors, without antitrust concerns in order to gather facts, do analysis and work toward solutions\u201d. This, they argue, must now be done for AI.<\/p>\n

My guess is that nothing much will be done now. These competing businesses will be unable to contain themselves, while the excuse of national security will make governments unwilling to act. <\/p>\n

The sheer complexity of regulating the industry\u2019s products in this age of AI omnipresence and recursive self-improvement will prove either too daunting or too good an excuse not even to try. So, we will go ahead in our usual helter-skelter (and all too human) fashion, simply hoping for the best.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on \u2018reckless\u2019 AI developmentOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

What could happen then? One possibility is that the worries about big impacts turn out to be grossly exaggerated. We may not see designer pandemics or big disruptions of our financial or physical infrastructures. Life will go on. Maybe, too, even the worrying economic and social effects will turn out to be manageable.<\/p>\n

Another possibility is that there is a (survivable) disaster of some kind that forces a change in our urgency very quickly. Then, perhaps, a regime of clear and heavy penalties on irresponsible providers, along with far more active monitoring and regulation, will at last be introduced, under heavy (and globally shared) public pressure. In the UK, one example is drug regulation in the 1960s, after the Thalidomide disaster.<\/p>\n

The third possibility is that the worries turn out to be correct. Something truly catastrophic does happen as AI\u2019s capacities turn out to have reached a cataclysmic level, whether acting on its own or exploited by malevolent humans (always in all-too-plentiful supply).<\/p>\n

\u201cI told you so\u201d will be too late. Could we not take precautions instead? \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leading figures in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry are calling for a slowdown in the rate of innovation.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,605,61,60,1682,80],"class_list":["post-631477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-elon-musk","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-openai","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}