There Is Only One Question That Matters with AI

A group called Future of Life Institute has circulated a petition, signed by nearly 3,000 people in and around the technology industry, calling for a six-month moratorium on large scale experiments with artificial intelligence (AI). The petition has triggered a huge debate. Those who have signed the petition note that developers of GPT-4 and other large language model AIs promise that their technology will change the course of civilization, but claims they have not taken appropriate steps to protect civilization from harm. Those who oppose the petition fall into two large buckets: those who are comfortable with the status quo of rapidly developing AI models and those who believe the petition sponsors are so focused on the future that they ignore widespread harms from existing applications of AI. The latter argument is particularly interesting, as the group includes leading technologists and scholars in the AI field, including Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, and Margaret Mitchell.