The headlines have been alarming indeed, essentially warning that unrestricted ongoing development of AI has a 10% chance of destroying all of us by the end of this decade. The Mound of sound offers his thoughts on this this:
Oh, damn! The United States has not recognized the "precautionary principle." If the AI warnings are right, we may all pay dearly for that lapse. In fact we, all of us, might need the protection of the precautionary principle more than we do at this moment.
What is the precautionary principle? It's not new and has been stated and restated in slightly different ways but the Wiki summary of it will suffice for this discussion.
"The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.
"This principle allows policy makers to make discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm from taking a particular course or making a certain decision when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result."
Better late than never the precautionary principle has been recognized as the law of the land in Canada in both the Federal Court of Canada and the Supreme Court of Canada.
In 2015, the Federal Court of Canada upheld the precautionary principle as part of the substantive law of our country. The Supreme Court of Canada has also applied the precautionary principle.
Can there be a peril more urgent than runaway artificial intelligence? The best and the brightest in that field from both academia and industry are warning that it could escape human control and actually turn on mankind. We've been warned by people like Geoffrey Hinton who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on artificial intelligence. He's the AI Nobel laureate. He admits the state of artificial intelligence today terrifies him.
And if you don't think societies will ignore existential risks read Jared Diamond's excellent book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Put it this way, this is not our first existential rodeo, although there's a possibility it could become our last.
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