Elon Musk’s influence on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump could lead to stricter artificial intelligence (AI) safety standards, according to Swedish-American scientist Max Tegmark, who also warned that any geopolitical AI arms race would lead to a “suicide race” for humanity.
Speaking at the Euronews Next website in Lisbon, Tegmark, who is the president of the Future of Life Institute, said that strengthening AI safety regulation in the United States will also depend on who Trump listens to.
What the scientist fears most is not generative AI, such as ChatGPT, but artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that matches or exceeds human cognitive capabilities and over which we may lose control.
What is artificial general intelligence?
Considered the “Holy Grail” by tech companies, AGI has been touted by Altman, among other tech figures trying to raise funding.
Altman defines AGI as a hypothetical form of machine intelligence that can solve any human problem in ways that are not limited to its training. Altman said that this could “elevate humanity” and does not imply a power grab by machines.
The OpenAI CEO said that AGI could appear as early as next year, while many others predict its appearance in the next decade.
“A lot of people have grabbed onto the AGI brand for the hype and are trying to redefine it as something they are selling now or something they are building now to raise money,” Tegmark said.
According to him, the original definition of AI dates back to the 1950s and defines it as AI that can do all human work, meaning AI can replace human workers, as well as design and build AI machines themselves.
AI arms race
According to Tegmark, in addition to the corporate AI race, there is also an AI arms race.
“There is an arms race going on in the United States between different companies, and the only way to stop it is, of course, the US national security standards,” he said.
“My vision of success here is much simpler. It is that the Chinese have decided to implement national security standards in China to prevent their Chinese companies from doing harm. We Americans are simply implementing national security standards in the United States, not to appease China, but simply for our own purposes.”
Once this theoretically happens, the United States and China will have an incentive to push their global allies to join them.
“I’m actually quite optimistic that we’ll get [security standards] around the world. And then we’re going to enter a really great phase of human history where we’re going to have an era of incredible abundance and prosperity, where we’re going to have all these amazing technologies,” he said.
“Companies will be able to innovate to cure cancer, to eliminate poverty and unnecessary road deaths, and all the wonderful things that we hear about from people, entrepreneurs,” he said.
