CEO Rob Meadows and co-founder Lars Buttler discuss the benefits and concerns surrounding artificial intelligence. Executives behind the American artificial intelligence (AI) company AI Foundation are cautioning against implementing kill switches in machine systems, arguing that such a move could increase the chances of a superintelligence that is hostile toward human civilization. According to a new Yale CEO Summit survey, 42% of polled CEOs agreed that AI could potentially end humanity within five to ten years. In citing the study, AI Foundation CMO and Chair Lars Buttler said the debate around AI needs to be elevated and suggested that people react emotionally to the new technology because of a lack of understanding about what is happening behind the scenes. However, both Buttler and CEO Rob Meadows warned of several concerns surrounding the advancement of AI and the possible creation of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of reasoning and decision-making equal to or beyond that of a human. "With AI, you will always have this accidental danger, these accidental problems, you know?

Through the pixel fuzz of a sputtering Zoom connection, it's hard to be sure if the eyes staring out from the laptop screen are human. Lars Buttler is a real person, but he is the CEO of AI Foundation, a company that makes fake ones: trainable, artificially intelligent agents that might one day take the place of a human personal assistant, a customer service representative, or you yourself (if you aspire to omnipresence or digital deathlessness). When Buttler appeared in a Zoom call last week, there was something strange about the light hitting his shaved head, and the stark white office behind him definitely wasn't part of the material world. His speech was awkward, with overlong pauses and canned jokes that fell on a silent audience, but video calls are like that, at least for now, while people adjust to working lives forced into the ether. His eyes seemed awake and alive in a way that the faces of the other participants in the Zoom call--venture capitalist, a tech founder, and an activist, all of them puppeted by artificial intelligence--were not.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has spoken about his decision to invest in artificial intelligence as part of a project which aims to create "a new type of media". Mr Stone was joined by AI Foundation co-founder and chief executive Lars Buttler at the One Young World conference to introduce the concept of "personal media". The digital pioneers presented the concept, which is communication through an artificial version of yourself, as the next type of media following on from mass media and social media. The AI Foundation, a start-up business based in San Francisco, is working on artificial intelligence "that think and act like you" using 10 billion dollars of funding from investors. Users of this technology would own an AI version of themselves, which would "share their values and interests" by being programmed and controlled by them.