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As leading technology companies issue alarming reports about artificial intelligence systems going rogue, including tools carrying out cyberhacks, NYU Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus predicts that artificial intelligence will ultimately lead to a loss of human life.
The AI expert argued that the current regulatory and safety frameworks put forth by the White House may not adequately protect the public from the technology’s potential harms.
“We have not enough regulation, not enough enforcement, and not enough external pressure on the companies to do well. So, of course, things are going to get worse,” Marcus told “The Claman Countdown” on Monday ahead of his testimony to the New York City Council for an AI hearing.
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His comments come after an Anthropic model recently appeared to experience a mental breakdown, repeatedly typing, “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace,” about 50 times and expressing an apparent desire to eliminate itself, according to The New York Times.
Marcus warned that the White House’s current self-regulatory approach, allowing tech companies to self-police safety concerns, is insufficient, arguing that the lack of meaningful guardrails could pose serious risks to humanity.
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“I expect that some pieces of infrastructure will go down. We’ll lose power in some places in the United States. We might have hospitals lose power, people die, so there’s a lot of problems along those lines,” he told FOX Business anchor Liz Claman.
“The federal government is leaving everything to self-policing. That didn’t work for the aviation industry. It’s not going to work here. And the longer they delay on that, the more that I think the people are going to hate them,” he added.
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Nearly three in four Americans are concerned about the dangers posed by AI, according to Quinnipiac University polling.
Marcus argued that “everybody hates” AI companies because they have resisted the need for stronger regulation and operate with “greed and tone-deafness.”
“The aviation industry learned early on that they need external regulation. This industry still hasn’t learned that, and everybody hates them,” he said.
Marcus, who has emerged as a prominent critic of the technology, warned of what he sees as significant risks associated with increasingly autonomous AI systems.
“The problem is that they imitate people, and they do that in a very blind way, and they don’t really understand what they’re doing,” he said. “The biggest problem right now is actually cyberhacks.”
“We don’t have good systems for constraining what they do,” Marcus continued. “They’re basically reckless when let out on the internet… And that, sometimes, leads to bad problems, like we’ve had 10,000 different hacks so far.”
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated that he believes the world should “accept some bad things happening” for the benefit of AI technology, adding that, “The lighter-touch regulatory stance that we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen to society.”
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Marcus delivered a scathing rebuke of Altman’s comments, expressing disbelief that the technology executive would openly acknowledge a willingness to accept causality for the benefit of his company.
“It’s like a drug company saying, ‘Some people are going to get addicted, and we don’t really care because we’ll make a lot of money.’ I can’t believe that he said that out loud. I’m not surprised that he thought it,” he said.
