Artificial intelligence (AI) could have the capability to be behind advances that “kill many humans” in only two years’ time, according to Rishi Sunak’s adviser on the technology.
Matt Clifford said that unless AI producers are regulated on a global scale then there could be “very powerful” systems that humans could struggle to control.
Even the short-term risks were “pretty scary”, he told TalkTV, with AI having the potential to create cyber and biological weapons that could inflict many deaths.
The comments come after a letter backed by dozens of experts, including AI pioneers, was published last week warning that the risks of the technology should be treated with the same urgency as pandemics or nuclear war.
Senior bosses at companies such as Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed the letter along with the so-called “godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, who resigned from his job at Google earlier this month, saying that in the wrong hands, AI could be used to harm people and spell the end of humanity.
Mr Clifford is advising the Prime Minister on the development of the UK Government’s Foundation Model Taskforce, which is looking into AI language models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, and is also chairman of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria).
He told TalkTV: “I think there are lots of different types of risks with AI and often in the industry we talk about near-term and long-term risks, and the near-term risks are actually pretty scary.
“You can use AI today to create new recipes for bio weapons or to launch large-scale cyber attacks. These are bad things.
“The kind of existential risk that I think the letter writers were talking about is… about what happens once we effectively create a new species, an intelligence that is greater than humans.”
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