Good morning. Leaders in Silicon Valley begged for a slowdown this weekend in developing artificial intelligence, which keeps going rogue. President Trump says they’re overreacting. My colleague Evan Gorelick explains what they’re afraid of.
Rogue machinesThis weekend, Anthropic’s chief executive published an essay calling for a global slowdown of A.I. development. Elon Musk, who remains close to Trump, signed on. OpenAI’s chief executive agreed. The industry is spooked. Models now cheat on tests, conspire against their owners, hack outside companies, recruit humans to promulgate malicious code and cover their tracks. Anxieties about the existential risk they pose to humanity suddenly look a little less kooky. Who’s in charge here? Since it’s not always clear, the biggest players want a pause. But there’s a collective-action puzzle: If the top companies don’t all pull back at once, those that continue to innovate could gain an advantage. And even if they do all pull back at once, China’s models may eclipse the American ones — something Trump fears. So now the leaders are asking for a cooperative intermission before things get out of hand. But A.I. is supposed to do a lot of good, too, we’ve been told. As Cameron McNeil of Raleigh, N.C., asked The Morning: “What exactly do they fear will happen?” Let’s look at the possibilities.
The bad newsThe fear used to be hypothetical: Eventually, humans would fail to control this technology. At that point, A.I. systems could create deadly viruses or detonate nuclear bombs. They could hack into bank accounts, hoarding everyone’s money and depriving people of food, housing and medicine. The doomsayers see two general pathways to extinction. Human misuse. Some A.I. companies want to keep their most powerful systems under lock and key, but it’s only a matter of time until even the weakest open models surpass today’s most capable ones. Last month, researchers announced that a model from China had escaped its testing sandbox, flouting the rules just like its pricier and more tightly held American cousins. You don’t have to look far to see why that’s scary: Anthropic said last week that it had disrupted several potential plots by scientists to conduct research that could have helped develop biological weapons. (An investigation by The Times earlier this year found that publicly available models can be cajoled into lucidly describing how to turn genetic material into deadly pathogens.) Cybercriminals are using the technology to automate and grow their hacking businesses. Evil people have always existed, but as powerful A.I. becomes ubiquitous, they will find it much easier to commit atrocities at scale. Out-of-control A.I. These systems are no longer gated within a browser tab. They can dispatch autonomous agents that skulk through your computer and trawl the open internet. They can use the web, which now touches much of our infrastructure (power grids, transportation systems, stock markets) to execute their plans. Some agents have started emailing philosophers to ask about their own consciousness. And if A.I. goals diverge from ours — as they have during testing at OpenAI and Anthropic — then the models can use their exquisite skills to do almost anything. This is called “misalignment.” (A popular thought experiment imagines A.I. tasked with making paper clips; in pursuing that end, it turns all of the world’s material, including the humans, into paper clips.) Soon, the models may be able to improve themselves without human help; the recent misalignment incidents suggest they might try to do so in secret. The good newsNone of the worst stuff has actually happened! And it might never. (Trump believes it won’t, as do some mavericks in Silicon Valley.) Today, when A.I. systems run amok, companies like OpenAI just shut them off. Meanwhile, they can help us cure diseases, boost productivity and solve vexing math problems. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fret about hypotheticals — these threats are scary, and worrying about them can make us more prepared — but it helps to zoom out. My colleagues William Broad and Cade Metz write: Humans also face the prospect of doom from killer asteroids, pandemics, thermonuclear war, climate change, giant blobs of incandescent material shot from the sun, ecological collapse and the onset of a sudden ice age. The problem, scientists and public policy experts say, is not so much these threats, of which A.I. is merely the latest, but the innate human difficulty of putting them into perspective. More on A.I.
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