Hundreds of public figures, including Nobel Prize-winning scientists, former military leaders, artists and British royalty, signed a statement Wednesday calling for a ban on work that could lead to computer superintelligence, a yet-to-be-reached stage of artificial intelligence that they said could one day pose a threat to humanity.<\/p>\n
The statement proposes \u201ca prohibition on the development of superintelligence\u201d until there is both \u201cbroad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably\u201d and \u201cstrong public buy-in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organized by AI researchers concerned about the fast pace of technological advances, the statement had more than 800 signatures Tuesday night from a diverse group of people. The signers include Nobel laureate and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton<\/a>, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, rapper Will.i.am, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon<\/a> and U.K. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle.<\/p>\n The statement adds to a growing list of calls for an AI slowdown<\/a> at a time when AI is threatening to remake large swaths of the economy and culture. OpenAI, Google, Meta and other tech companies are pouring billions of dollars into new AI models and the data centers that power them, while businesses of all kinds are looking for ways to add AI features to a broad range of products and services.<\/p>\n Some AI researchers believe AI systems are advancing fast enough that soon they\u2019ll demonstrate what\u2019s known as artificial general intelligence<\/a>, or the ability to perform intellectual tasks as a human could. From there, researchers and tech executives believe what could follow might be superintelligence<\/a>, in which AI models perform better than even the most expert humans<\/a>.<\/p>\n The statement is a product of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit group that works on large-scale risks such as nuclear weapons, biotechnology and AI. Among its early backers in 2015 was tech billionaire Elon Musk<\/a>, who\u2019s now part of the AI race with his startup xAI. Now, the institute says<\/a>, its biggest recent donor is Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain<\/a>, and it says it doesn\u2019t accept donations from big tech companies or from companies seeking to build artificial general intelligence. <\/p>\n Its executive director, Anthony Aguirre, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said AI developments are happening faster than the public can understand what\u2019s happening or what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve, at some level, had this path chosen for us by the AI companies and founders and the economic system that\u2019s driving them, but no one\u2019s really asked almost anybody else, \u2018Is this what we want?\u2019\u201d he said in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been quite surprising to me that there has been less outright discussion of \u2018Do we want these things? Do we want human-replacing AI systems?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of taken as: Well, this is where it\u2019s going, so buckle up, and we\u2019ll just have to deal with the consequences. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s how it actually is. We have many choices as to how we develop technologies, including this one.\u201d<\/p>\n The statement isn\u2019t aimed at any one organization or government in particular. Aguirre said he hopes to force a conversation that includes not only major AI companies, but also politicians in the United States, China and elsewhere. He said the Trump administration\u2019s pro-industry views<\/a> on AI need balance.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not what the public wants. They don\u2019t want to be in a race for this,\u201d he said. He said there might eventually need to be an international treaty on advanced AI, as there is for other potentially dangerous technologies.<\/p>\n The White House didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment on the statement Tuesday, ahead of its official release.<\/p>\n Americans are almost evenly split<\/a> over the potential impact of AI, according to an NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey this year. While 44% of U.S. adults surveyed said they thought AI would make their and their families\u2019 lives better, 42% said they thought it would make their futures worse.<\/p>\n Top tech executives, who have offered predictions about superintelligence and signaled that they are working toward it as a goal, didn\u2019t sign the statement. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that superintelligence was \u201cnow in sight<\/a>.\u201d Musk posted on X in February that the advent of digital superintelligence \u201cis happening in real-time<\/a>\u201d and has earlier warned about \u201crobots going down the street killing people<\/a>,\u201d though now Tesla, where Musk is CEO, is working to develop humanoid robots<\/a>. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that he\u2019d be surprised<\/a> if superintelligence didn\u2019t arrive by 2030 and wrote in a January blog post<\/a> that his company was turning its attention there.<\/p>\n Several tech companies didn\u2019t immediately respond to requests for comment on the statement.<\/p>\n