An AI Pause Is Humanity's Best Bet For Preventing Extinction

The existential risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) are now widely recognized. After hundreds of industry and science leaders warned that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," the U.N. Secretary-General recently echoed their concern. So did the prime minister of the U.K., who is also investing 100 million pounds into AI safety research that is mostly meant to prevent existential risk. Other leaders are likely to follow in recognizing AI's ultimate threat. In the scientific field of existential risk, which studies the most likely causes of human extinction, AI is consistently ranked at the top of the list.