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Is AI superintelligence inevitable? AI safety researcher David Krueger says it doesn’t have to be. Krueger, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal and founder of the nonprofit Evitable, warns that “we need to mitigate the risk of extinction” with regulation and moratoriums to halt the development of AI’s computational power and complexity, which he says is progressing at a rate much faster than current levels of human supervision can manage. Public statements from AI companies that their models have circumvented test constraints and broken into other systems are “what we should expect to happen with the way that we’re building AI, with how little we understand it and how primitive our techniques are for controlling it,” Krueger says. “We just don’t know how to build it safely. End of story.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Facebook and Instagram owner Meta admitted Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during security testing after it was accidentally allowed access to the internet by independent testing company Irregular. This comes on the heels of similar admissions by rival companies OpenAI and Anthropic.

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI,” warned Wednesday at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, quote, “I don’t believe we’re going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can’t escape,” he said, and said he is “very worried” we could lose control.

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Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought together leading AI scientists from the U.S. and China to discuss the risks posed by AI for an event titled “The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation.” This is Senator Sanders.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We are already starting to see AI’s impact. There are estimates, from very credible sources, that tens of millions of jobs could be lost here in the United States in the next 10 years, whole professions wiped out, and young people finding it harder and harder to land entry-level jobs. Psychologists worry about the mental health challenges facing our young people and about the increased isolation they experience when they become more and more dependent on AI chatbots for their emotional support. Civil libertarians tell us that AI will be able to analyze every email, every text, every phone call, every website visit, every purchase that we make, and that our privacy rights may well be eviscerated. Political scientists worry that AI could threaten the integrity of our elections and political institutions, where voters will find it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between truth and lies. And yet, as enormously significant as all of these profound changes might seem, there is another AI development that could have an even more frightening impact. If AI becomes smarter than human beings, as many scientists believe will happen, the human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences. In other words, the richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes. They acknowledge that they don’t understand how it works and they don’t know where it is heading.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We are already starting to see AI’s impact. There are estimates, from very credible sources, that tens of millions of jobs could be lost here in the United States in the next 10 years, whole professions wiped out, and young people finding it harder and harder to land entry-level jobs.

Psychologists worry about the mental health challenges facing our young people and about the increased isolation they experience when they become more and more dependent on AI chatbots for their emotional support.

Civil libertarians tell us that AI will be able to analyze every email, every text, every phone call, every website visit, every purchase that we make, and that our privacy rights may well be eviscerated.

Political scientists worry that AI could threaten the integrity of our elections and political institutions, where voters will find it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between truth and lies.

And yet, as enormously significant as all of these profound changes might seem, there is another AI development that could have an even more frightening impact. If AI becomes smarter than human beings, as many scientists believe will happen, the human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences.

In other words, the richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes. They acknowledge that they don’t understand how it works and they don’t know where it is heading.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined from the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas by David Krueger. He’s assistant professor in robust, reasoning and responsible AI at the University of Montreal, also founder of Evitable, a nonprofit that educates the public about the risks of artificial intelligence. He recently wrote a piece for USA Today headlined “No, AI isn’t inevitable. We should stop it while we can.”

How, David Krueger? How do you stop it while you can? What do you see as the greatest dangers of AI right now? And talk about the climate of this massive gathering in Las Vegas.

DAVID KRUEGER: Yeah, I’m really glad you started with that clip from Senator Sanders. You know, I spoke with him in March from that event that you quoted, and I agree with virtually everything he said about all the different risks and issues we’re seeing with AI right now, and especially, you know, where this is headed: mass unemployment, human disempowerment and, ultimately, potentially the end of our species.

So, this could all be happening, you know, very soon. At this point, it’s really an urgent crisis. I and other experts have been sounding the alarm for many years now. And in 2023, especially after the release of ChatGPT, we saw, you know, the leading experts, like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, myself, hundreds of AI researchers, signing public statements saying that this is an existential risk. We need to mitigate the risk of extinction.

So, that is the conversation we need to be having now, is how do we do it. And, you know, there’s different proposals on the table here. I think the basic thing that we need to do, in my mind, is stop building more AI chips, stop building more data centers, and actually look at getting rid of or taking offline some of the chips we already have, as well as the factories and technology for producing those AI chips. So, this is very specialized, advanced hardware, some of the most advanced technology in the world. The supply chain for it is extremely concentrated. And these are, of course, massive, massive investments. So, governments really have the ability to bring this to a grinding halt, if they choose to do so.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And could you explain,........

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