"I always thought AI was going to be way smarter than humans and an existential risk, and that's turning out to be true," Musk said in February, noting he thinks there is a 20% chance of human "annihilation" by AI. While estimates vary, the idea that advanced AI systems could destroy humanity traces back to the origin of many of the labs developing the technology today. In 2015, Altman called the development of superhuman machine intelligence "probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." Alongside Hassabis and Amodei, he signed a statement in May 2023 declaring that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." "It strikes me as odd that some leaders think that AI can be so brilliant that it will solve the world's problems, using solutions we didn't think of, but not so brilliant that it can't escape whatever control constraints we think of," says Margaret Mitchell, Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face.

The expectation that generative AI could fundamentally upend business models and product offerings is driven by the technology's power to unlock vast amounts of data that were previously inaccessible. "Eighty to 90% of the world's data is unstructured," says Baris Gultekin, head of AI at AI data cloud company Snowflake. "But what's exciting is that AI is opening the door for organizations to gain insights from this data that they simply couldn't before." In a poll conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights, global executives were asked about the value they hoped to derive from generative AI. Many say they are prioritizing the technology's ability to increase efficiency and productivity (72%), increase market competitiveness (55%), and drive better products and services (47%).

Well, that didn't happen, obviously. I sat down with MIT professor Max Tegmark, the founder and president of FLI, to take stock of what has happened since. Here are highlights of our conversation. On shifting the Overton window on AI risk: Tegmark told me that in conversations with AI researchers and tech CEOs, it had become clear that there was a huge amount of anxiety about the existential risk AI poses, but nobody felt they could speak about it openly "for fear of being ridiculed as Luddite scaremongerers." "The key goal of the letter was to mainstream the conversation, to move the Overton window so that people felt safe expressing these concerns," he says.

We've been here before, of course: AI doom follows AI hype. But this time feels different. The Overton window has shifted in discussions around AI risks and policy. What was once an extreme view is now a mainstream talking point, grabbing not only headlines but the attention of world leaders. Whittaker is not the only one who thinks this.

The danger of artificial intelligence is a common theme in science fiction because it allows authors and filmmakers to explore ethical and societal questions that arise when humans develop entities that can rival or surpass their own intelligence. There are various reasons why this keeps popping up. The biggest one is probably loss of control. Human beings fear the idea of losing control over the AI they create, which makes it a common theme of science fiction. This fear has often manifested in movies like "The Terminator," where an AI becomes so intelligent that it sees humanity as a threat to its survival and wages war against humans.

Access to STEM education remains a challenge for many young people in the UK, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds. Research shows that 38% of schools do not offer GCSE computer science at all, and many schools, mostly situated in disadvantaged areas, do not enrol students in triple science subjects (physics, biology and chemistry) - limiting opportunities to study science at a higher level. These barriers not only contribute to the existing attainment gap, they directly impact the number of opportunities students have to pursue a career in STEM related fields, including AI, down the line. We will be working closely with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity that promotes the study of computing and digital technologies, to develop new AI-focused resources including lesson plans for students and training for teachers. Created to be culturally relevant and accessible to all students aged 11-14, the resources will be designed to help them better understand AI and the role it will play in their future.

What follows is the second part of our coverage of the "Radiology: Artificial Intelligence Fireside Chat" conducted at RSNA 2021.

What follows is the second part of our coverage of the "Radiology: Artificial Intelligence Fireside Chat" conducted at RSNA 2021. The in-depth discussion, for which excerpts are presented here, was well-facilitated by Dania Daye, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School; and Paul Yi, MD., University of Maryland School of Medicine; with RSNA Journal Radiology: AI Editor Charles E. Kahn, Jr., MD, MS, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Featured panelists included: John Mongan, MD, PhD, University of California, San Francisco; Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, MS, PhD, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging; and Linda Moy, MD, NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Q: The successes we have seen in AI are clear. There is cutting-edge research emerging, but with every success, we are identifying multiple obstacles.

Earlier this week an artificial intelligence-powered rapper was dropped from its label (yes, it had a label) after its algorithm learned to use racial slurs in its lyrics. More usefully, a recent AI trial at Queensland's Princess Alexandra Hospital was able to give early warnings as much as eight hours before a patient's condition was predicted to decline. Artificial technology is about to send a "tidal wave" of disruption through the way we work, according to a once-in-a-decade forecast by CSIRO, the national science agency. The federal government is being urged to use the upcoming national jobs summit to "double down" on policies set by the former government to ride that tidal wave, or risk being rode over. AI technology is forecast to replace as much as half of the work that is done today by 2030.

Anand Rao: AI is impacting every industry sector and every functional area. It is a general purpose technology that will have a profound influence in the next 10-20 years on how we interact with each other and how individuals, businesses, and governments make decisions. In some cases they are also moving from automating and transforming today's businesses to disrupting our current business models. We are already seeing fundamental ways in which AI has changed our behaviours – from searching for content, to summarising and synthesising what we read, see, or hear, to even creating new forms of art, music, and literature. As a result, businesses that ignore AI are doing so at their own peril.