Can UK's big summit save us from AI nightmare?
Technology
Around 100 world leaders, tech bosses and researchers are gathering in UK
(Web Desk) - If you don't know where you stand on artificial intelligence, you're not alone.
Will it save humanity or destroy us? The stakes are that high and the jury is still out, even among the world's leading experts.
Some AI creators are calling for its development to slow down or even pause altogether because it's evolving so quickly.
Others argue that doing so will mean we cramp the tech's potential to achieve amazing things, like generating formulas for new medicines and work on climate-change solutions.
This coming week, around 100 world leaders, tech bosses, academics and AI researchers are gathering at the UK's Bletchley Park campus, once home to the codebreakers who helped secure victory during World War Two.
Their purpose is to take part in discussions about how best to maximise the benefits of this powerful technology while minimising the risks.
The event is the UK's AI Safety Summit, and the risks it intends to focus on are pretty extreme. They relate to so-called "frontier AI", the most advanced and powerful systems, which don't currently exist but AI is advancing so rapidly that they may do soon.
But critics say the focus of the two-day meeting should be on the more immediate and pressing problems of AI, such as the large amount of energy it consumes and the impact it is already having on jobs.
In a report released last week, the UK government listed some horrifying potential threats, including bio-terrorism, cyber-attacks, advanced AI choosing to control itself, and the increased distribution of deepfake images of child sexual abuse.
Perhaps surprisingly, given this nightmarish backdrop, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak urged people "not to lose sleep". He has a plan, and it's an ambitious one. He wants to position the UK as the global leader for AI safety.
When the summit was first announced, and billed as a world-first, there were quite a few raised eyebrows. Would the world's top brass actually travel to a remote, leafy corner of England, in the winter cold and close to the US Thanksgiving holiday, just because the UK says so?
No official guest list has been published. But it's pretty clear by now that the US tech giants will be very well represented. Not always at CEO level, but high-level execs nonetheless.
There's no shortage of summit enthusiasm from the commercial sector. British-based Stability AI boss Emad Mostaque described the summit as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" for the UK to unlock AI superpower status.
"We will encourage the government and other policymakers to commit to supporting AI safety right across the ecosystem, from corporate labs to everyday researchers and from long-term threats to short-term risks to keep Britain safe and competitive," he gushed.
These firms are an essential part of the discussion - they are at the front of the AI race and they are the ones building the systems.
But you might imagine these are conversations they are already having among themselves. Diversity of thought here is crucial.
The world-leader contingent is a bit more of a mixed bag. US Vice-President Kamala Harris is attending, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is not. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will be there, German chancellor Olaf Scholz won't. China has been invited - controversially so, given its difficult relationship with the west. But it is still undoubtedly a tech superpower.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is also going - which is interesting because there are growing calls for a global body to take on AI oversight.
Some experts fear that the summit has got its priorities wrong. The risk of extreme doomsday scenarios are comparatively small, they argue, and there are more immediate threats, far closer to home, which will be more worrying for many people.
"We're concerned about what's going to happen to our jobs, what's going to happen to our news, what's going to happen to our ability to communicate with one another. We're concerned about the threats to people, communities, and frankly, the planet," says Prof Gina Neff, who runs an AI centre at the University of Cambridge.
