(OPINION) ETH – Scientists at Max Planck Society in Europe are sounding the alarm and warning that with our current technology, humanity has no chance of controlling a superintelligent artificial intelligence capable of saving or destroying humanity.
According to the report from “Interesting Engineering“, a paper that was recently published by the research institute’s paper, in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, focused solely on humanity’s reaction capability towards a hypothetical Skynet-style AI that decides to end humanity.
The paper gave a scenario asking “If a super- artificial intelligence of the future decided, as an example, that the most efficient way to end human suffering would be to simply end humanity, what would we do to stop it”? This question was presented by those at Max Planck Society in their recently published research.
The answer they gave was alarming. According to these scientists, humanity would pretty much have to stand by and watch ourselves be obliterated. Scientists were so terrified from this scenario that they are urging that researchers develop what they refer to as a “containment algorithm” that simulates the dangerous behavior of a superintelligent AI and prevents it from doing anything harmful.
These researchers are also warning that AI capable of making impactful decisions for humanity are just around the corner. “A super-intelligent machine that controls the world sounds like science fiction,” study coauthor Manuel Cebrian, Leader of the Digital Mobilization Group at the Center for Humans and Machines of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, said in a press release.
“But there are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned it. The question, therefore, arises whether this could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity,” Cebrian continued.
