You can’t recall AI like a defective drug

Why pharma-style governance doesn’t work for tech.

[Source Image: Pixabay]

At a recent AI summit in New Delhi, Sam Altman warned that early versions of superintelligence could arrive by 2028, that AI could be weaponized to create novel pathogens, and that democratic societies need to act before they are overtaken by the technology they have built. These concerns are widely shared across the industry. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate known as “the godfather of AI,” has warned that creating digital beings more intelligent than ourselves poses a genuine existential threat. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, devoted much of his book The Coming Wave to the argument that AI’s fusion with synthetic biology could put the tools to engineer a deadly pandemic within reach of a single individual. These are not warnings about a distant future. Last week, a clash over who controls AI and on what terms led to a complete collapse in the company’s relationship with the Pentagon.

When politicians and business leaders try to make sense of issues like these, they are often tempted to look to the pharmaceutical........

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