Prince Harry, Meghan join call for ban on development of AI superintelligence

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have joined prominent computer scientists, economists, artists, evangelical Christian leaders and US conservative commentators Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck to call for a ban on AI “superintelligence” that threatens humanity. The letter, released Wednesday by a politically and geographically diverse group of public figures, takes square aim at tech giants such as Google, OpenAI and Meta Platforms who are racing to build a form of artificial intelligence designed to outperform humans at many tasks. The 30-word statement says: “We call for a ban on the development of superintelligence, which is not lifted until there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.” In a preamble, the letter notes that AI tools can bring health and prosperity, but along with those tools, “many leading AI companies have the stated goal of building superintelligence in the coming decade that can significantly outperform all humans on essentially all cognitive tasks. This has raised concerns ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment of freedom, liberty, civil control, national security and control.” risks and even potential human extinction.” In a personal note, Prince Harry added that “the future of AI must serve humanity, not replace it. I believe the true test of progress will not be how fast we move, but how wisely we steer. There are no second chances.” His wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, signed alongside the Duke of Sussex. “This is not a ban or even a moratorium in the usual sense,” wrote another signatory, Stuart Russell, an AI pioneer and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is simply a proposal to require adequate safeguards for a technology that, according to its developers, has a significant chance of causing human extinction. Is that too much to ask?” AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, co-winners of the Turing Award, computer science’s top prize, also signed. Hinton also won a Nobel Prize in physics last year. Both drew attention to the dangers of a technology they helped create. But the list also has some surprises, including Bannon and Beck, in an effort by organizers of the letter at the non-profit Future of Life Institute to appeal to President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, even as Trump’s White House staff has sought to ease restrictions on AI development in the US. Also on the list are Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; British billionaire Richard Branson; former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, who served under Republican and Democratic administrations; and Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice, who was national security adviser to President Barack Obama. Former Irish president Mary Robinson and several British and European members of parliament signed, as did actors Stephen Fry and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and musician will.i.am, who otherwise embraced AI in music creation. “Yes, we want specific AI tools that can help cure disease, strengthen national security, etc.,” wrote Gordon-Levitt, whose wife Tasha McCauley served on OpenAI’s board of directors before the upheaval that led to CEO Sam Altman’s temporary ouster in 2023. “But AI also needs to mimic humans, make us kids to make us kids, serve junk into dollars ads? Most people don’t want that.” The letter is likely to spark ongoing debates among the AI ​​research community about the likelihood of superhuman AI, the technical paths to achieving it, and how dangerous it might be. “In the past it was mostly the nerds versus the nerds,” said Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I feel like what we’re really seeing here is how the criticism has become very mainstream.” Confounding the broader debate is that the same companies that pursue what some call superintelligence and others call artificial general intelligence, or AGI, also sometimes inflate the capabilities of their products, which could make them more marketable and have contributed to concerns about an AI bubble. OpenAI was recently derided by mathematicians and AI scientists when its researcher claimed ChatGPT figured out unsolved math problems – when what it really did was find and summarize what was already online. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s been hyped and you have to be careful as an investor, but that doesn’t change the fact that — if you zoom out — AI has gone much faster in the last four years than most people predicted,” Tegmark said. Tegmark’s group was also behind a March 2023 letter — still at the dawn of a commercial AI boom — calling on tech giants to temporarily pause development of more powerful AI models. None of the big AI companies heeded that call. And the most prominent signatory of the 2023 letter, Elon Musk, was at the same time quietly setting up his own AI startup to compete with those he wanted to take a 6-month break. Asked if he was reaching out to Musk again this time, Tegmark said he had written to the CEOs of all major AI developers in the US but did not expect them to sign. “I really empathize with them, honestly, because they’re so caught up in this race to the bottom that they just feel an irresistible pressure to keep going and not get overtaken by the other guy,” Tegmark said. “I think that’s why it’s so important to stigmatize the race to superintelligence, to the point where the US government is just stepping in.”