{"id":781016,"date":"2026-09-24T11:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T11:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/781016\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T11:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T11:38:12","slug":"nick-clegg-plays-down-fears-godlike-ai-could-exterminate-humanity-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/781016\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Clegg plays down fears \u2018godlike\u2019 AI could exterminate humanity | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Clegg has dismissed fears over AI\u2019s \u201cgodlike power to exterminate humanity\u201d, calling it a sign that tech bosses are \u201cbreathing their own fumes\u201d.<\/p>\n

The former UK deputy prime minister said that tech bosses should focus on addressing known specific threats such as cybersecurity and bioweapons rather than the \u201cslightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Speaking to BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme, he said: \u201cI think it is perhaps accidentally self-serving, because it sort of implies that we can only be made safe by having everything controlled, in effect, by an oligopoly of a small number of companies, and I think it slightly paralyses the political debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clegg, who was formerly the president of global affairs at Meta<\/a> and owns more than 917,000 shares in Nscale, a UK-based datacentre, and is a cofounder of the AI startup AMI Labs, said he spent \u201ca huge amount of time\u201d with people in the tech industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t agree amongst themselves at all. Of course, we hear the most apocalyptic voices,\u201d he said, noting that one person who runs an AI lab said the current discourse was \u201ctotally silly\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a culture in Silicon Valley \u2013 it\u2019s an odd place for those who haven\u2019t been there. It is in many ways the centre of the universe, or at least claiming to shape it. It\u2019s also an oddly parochial place. It\u2019s a strange sort of culture where the engineers can get quite close to the technology and start slightly breathing their own fumes as they wind themselves up into a lather about these things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Asked about the autonomous hack<\/a> conducted by a group of OpenAI agents on a major real-world company, Hugging Face, Clegg said there was a case for \u201ctramlines and greater transparency\u201d.<\/p>\n

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However, he said this would be unlikely to happen under a Trump administration given its competitiveness on AI. He also suspected China\u2019s cooperation would be limited, since the development of AI technologies was viewed as a \u201cnational mission\u201d after the country was \u201ccheated out of the Industrial Revolution\u201d.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI think there\u2019s a great potential for the big three techno democracies in the world \u2013 India, Europe and the US \u2013 to collaborate more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Asked whether the British prime minister, Andy Burnham, could take a lead on such efforts, Clegg noted the UK was not a world leader on AI: \u201cWe need to be realistic about what influence we can and cannot exert.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clegg also disagreed with other proposed remedies, such as introducing a \u201ckill switch\u201d, which he said would be unworkable; or only producing closed models, where source code is not made public, which he said were no safer than open source models according to the evidence.<\/p>\n

Instead, he suggested: \u201cThere is a lot that can be done both voluntarily and through regulation, to enforce far greater transparency on the way in which these models are concocted and how they operate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick Clegg has dismissed fears over AI\u2019s \u201cgodlike power to exterminate humanity\u201d, calling it a sign that tech…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-781016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}