Artificial Intelligence Is Sophisticated, Autonomous, and Maybe Dangerous--Here's Why

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to cause global disaster, but humans can take steps to prevent calamity, experts say. A new survey finds that more than a third of scientists doing AI research believe that the decisions made by AIs could trigger a debacle as bad or worse than nuclear war. The research highlights growing concern that AI could have unintended dangerous effects and produce many benefits. The way to stop computers from harming people? "Develop principles for safe and trustworthy AI," Michael Huth, the head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and a senior researcher at the AI company Xayn told Lifewire in an email interview. "This is already happening for deep learning applications, such image classifications, where one can verify, in principle, whether small input distortions can make the AI model misclassify a commercial airplane as an attacking fighter jet."