Michael Trazzi, a former AI safety researcher from France, recently went on a hunger strike outside of DeepMind’s London office. He told Business Insider he was protesting the company’s pursuit of “frontier models” and superhuman AI technologies.
Earlier this summer, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” told “Diary of a CEO” podcast host Steven Bartlett that he believes coming AI advances will exacerbate poverty. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”
Meanwhile, as you’ll read about in one of this issue’s articles, students at MIT and Stanford are dropping out of college over fears artificial general intelligence (AGI) will render their fields of study obsolete before they can graduate.
It’s clear that AGI is having a strong effect on people. What’s remarkable is that it hasn’t even been developed yet.
Some scientists claim AGI is right around the corner. Others insist current techniques are a dead-end despite the success of products such as ChatGPT and Claude.
From where we’re sitting, it seems like your guess about when AGI will arrive is as good as ours. And that’s exactly why we’ve created this newsletter.
Maybe we have forever to prepare for AGI. And maybe we only have until tomorrow. Nobody can say for sure. Luckily for humanity, this means we still have time to try and figure some things out before it’s too late.
Our intent is to cut through the noise and provide clarity to the discussion surrounding AGI ethics. Wherever the news cycle, political policy, and the world of AI research takes us, AGI Ethics News will be there to frame and spur critical thinking and high-level discourse.
Perhaps one of the first things we should address is the question of what, exactly, defines the difference between AI and AGI. Not just the technical differences, but the consequential ones, especially ethical and social.
What is the threshold at which an AI system becomes AGI?
Finding these answers won’t be easy. The truth about non-biological intelligence isn’t written in an ancient tome or discernible through brute-force mathematics. We may find that, to truly define AGI, we must eschew the search for the perfect Turing Test and, instead, look for evidence of an ethical impetus to illuminate the path forward. Ethics and connectedness are more than a measuring stick; as KB points out in his publisher’s note, they are fundamental elements of being and being human. Understanding how new beings contribute to our well-being is essential for finding a world we want to live in.
Add your voice to the AGI ethics debate — Share your thoughts with us.
To that end, we are developing a framework to identify, categorize, and study the ethical questions surrounding the emergence of AGI. Our hope in doing so is to use this framework to build a hub for discourse and deliberation, with your feedback.
We think it’s important to ask these difficult questions and to ensure that everyone who has a stake in the future is given the opportunity to participate in the discussion.
- Do we have the right to develop technology that has the potential to act as an existential threat to our species?
- Is it ethical to inhibit or delay the development of a technology that could help our species solve some of its greatest challenges (e.g. hunger, poverty, disease, and death)?
- How can we best ready humanity for both scenarios?
With the help of world-renowned researchers such as Professor Wendell Wallach (see this issue’s feature article), and seasoned science and technology journalists like myself and Matthew Hughes (also in this issue), we intend to investigate these and hundreds of other questions that explore the ethical considerations surrounding the potential emergence of AGI.
Alongside our original articles, this inaugural issue of the AGI Ethics News newsletter also features photography from Emmy-award winning journalist Robert Aglow.
Each month we’ll feature original stories written by subject matter experts and talented journalists that highlight and promote ethical discourse on AGI technologies. And that’s where you come in. Whether you’d like to submit an article, ask some questions, or just share your thoughts on the ethics of AGI, we want to hear from you.
Send your thoughts, pitches, and any requests for more information to editor@agiethicsnews.com.
AGI Ethics News covers the ethical and societal implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI). We bring expert insights and thoughtful analysis to help readers understand the challenges and responsibilities of emerging AI technologies.