Donald Trump dismisses AI risks despite days of worrying expert warnings
President Donald Trump has suggested that people are overreacting when it comes to the risks surrounding artificial intelligence, claiming that scenarios are being brought up that ‘won’t happen’.
The US leader made the remark during his visit to Ireland last week, after experts issued warnings about the technology.
This came after a former researcher for Anthropic argued that ‘there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future’.
While Trump didn’t address these claims directly, he did make several remarks about the future of AI, claiming: “You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
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Both Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have backed Anthropic’s Dario Amodei’s warning that the pace of AI’s development should be slowed down in order to ‘reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong’.
But this doesn’t appear to have phased the president, as he went on to say: “We’re leading China on AI... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
This comes despite growing concerns being voiced by experts about the risks that the advancement of AI could have on humanity.
Computer scientist, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who is widely recognized as being a pioneer of modern AI, is urging people to be aware of the risks.
More recently, the expert has warned that if AI becomes superintelligent, then this could ‘lead to human extinction’.
Hinton explained: “We would be very foolish to develop superintelligence now, when there is no scientific consensus it can be developed safely and controllably.
“Losing control over AI smarter than ourselves could be catastrophic and could even lead to human extinction.”
These comments were placed with a bill that has been written by ControlAI and has been presented to the Labour Party in the UK.
Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that autonomous AI swarms could compromise the internet within 12 months.
In a new essay, he stated: “Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”