AI Experts Call For Policy Action to Avoid Extreme Risks

On Tuesday, 24 AI experts, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, released a paper calling on governments to take action to manage risks from AI. The policy document had a particular focus on extreme risks posed by the most advanced systems, such as enabling large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. The paper makes a number of concrete policy recommendations, such as ensuring that major tech companies and public funders devote at least one-third of their AI R&D budget to projects that promote safe and ethical use of AI. The authors also call for the creation of national and international standards. Bengio, scientific director at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, says that the paper aims to help policymakers, the media, and the general public "understand the risks, and some of the things we have to do to make [AI] systems do what we want."