The debate over potential dangers posed by artificial intelligence has resurged in recent weeks, with researchers once again warning the technology could end humanity, and leaders of AI companies suggesting development needed to be slowed.
One of the co-founders of AI firm Anthropic told the BBC this week he believed kill switches may need to be made mandatory for AI. “From an AI cybersecurity perspective, the term ‘kill switch’ refers to the ability to interrupt the execution of an AI agent’s action,” Nicolas Papernot, a professor at the University of Toronto and a specialist in computer security and artificial intelligence, told AFP. “In that case, we would have to simultaneously interrupt the action of all copies the worm made of itself — device by device by device,” he said.
“There are an enormous number of companies around the world, and all sorts of different software and services. There’s no single person who controls AI as a whole. US President Donald Trump has dismissed existential fears about AI as a hoax, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued against calls to slow AI development, saying market incentives and legal liability are the best safeguards.
But in his other two “decentralised” scenarios, where AI programs have been given permissions to act on other software, files, machines or even systems, it would be much more difficult to stop everything.
