... As cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress earlier this week, the singular nature of AI compels a dedicated national or international agency to license and audit frontier AI systems. ...
An AI trained on pharmaceutical data in 2022 to design non-toxic chemicals had its sign flipped and quickly came up with recipes for nerve gas and 40,000 other lethal compounds. ...
The favored metaphor in 2023 has been a Lovecraftian shoggoth, an alien intelligence on which we strap a yellow smiley face mask—but the human-likeness is fleeting and superficial. ...
It may be inauspicious to compare AI safety technology with the rapid nuclear weaponization of the Manhattan Project. In 1942, shortly after it began, the world's first nuclear chain reaction was ignited just a few blocks from where I sit at the University of Chicago. In July 1945, the world's first nuclear weapon was tested in New Mexico, and a month later, the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ...
See the full story here: https://www.salon.com/2023/05/18/why-we-need-a-manhattan-project-for-ai-safety/