An AI Expert Warning: 6 People Are (Quietly) Deciding Humanity’s Future! We Must Act Now!

In October, over 850 experts including yourself and other leaders like Richard Branson and Geoffrey Hinton signed a statement to ban AI superintelligence as you guys raised concerns of potential human extinction.

Because unless we figure out how do we guarantee that the AI systems are safe, we're toast.

And you've been so influential on the subject of AI. You wrote the textbook that many of the CEOs who are building some of the AI companies now would have studied on the subject of AI.

Yup.

So, do you have any regrets?

Um... (suspenseful music)

Professor Stuart Russell has been named one of Time magazine's most influential voices in AI.

After spending over 50 years researching, teaching- And finding ways to design AI in such a way that humans maintain control.

You talk about this gorilla problem as a way to understand AI in the context of humans.

Yeah. So a few million years ago, the human line branched off from the gorilla line in evolution, and now the gorillas have no say in whether they continue to exist because we are much smarter than they are.

So intelligence is actually the single most important factor to control on Earth?

Yup.

But we're in the process of making something more intelligent than us.

Exactly.

Why don't people stop then?

Well, one of the reasons is something called the Midas touch. So King Midas is this legendary king who asked the gods, "Can everything I touch turn to gold?" And we think of the Midas touch as being a good thing, but he goes to drink some water and the water is turned to gold. When he goes to comfort his daughter, his daughter turns to gold. And so he dies in misery and starvation. So this applies to our current situation in two ways. One is that greed is driving these companies to pursue technology with the probabilities of extinction being worse than playing Russian roulette, and that's even according to the people developing the technology without our permission. And people are just fooling themselves if they think it's naturally going to be controllable. So, you know, after 50 years I could retire, but instead I'm working 80 or 100 hours a week trying to move things in the right direction.

So if you had a button in front of you which would stop all progress in artificial intelligence, would you press it?

Not yet. I think there's still a decent chance to guarantee safety, and I can explain more of what that is.

I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe, so if you could do me a favor and double-check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going and this show in the trajectory it's on. So please do double-check if you've subscribed and, uh, thank you so much, because in a strange way you are, you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you. (upbeat music) Professor Stuart Russell OBE, a lot of people have been talking about AI for the last couple of years. It appears you've... This really shocked me. It appears you've been talking about AI for most of your life.