British expert warns of the danger of "super artificial intelligence"

 British scientist Stuart Russell, known for his contributions to artificial intelligence, asserted that powerful AI systems are uncontrollable.

Professor Stuart Russell was one of more than 1,000 experts last March who signed an open letter calling for a six-month halt to development of systems more capable than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4 - the successor to ChatGPT and powered by GPT-3.5.

How do the most powerful systems work?

• Sky News quoted Russell as saying: "I signed the letter because I think it should be said that we don't understand how these (more powerful) systems work. We don't know what they are capable of. That means we can't control them."
• "People are worried about misinformation and racial and gender bias in the output of these systems," he noted.
• One of the biggest concerns, he added, is misinformation and deepfakes (videos or images of a person whose face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else - usually used maliciously or to spread false information).

Anxiety

• The expert, who is a professor of computer science at the University of California, warned that "the huge impact of these systems is made for the worse by manipulating people in ways that they don't even realize it's happening."
• He said that China, Russia and North Korea have large teams that "inject disinformation" and with AI "we gave them a powerful tool".
• "The concern of the letter is really about the next generation of the system. Right now, the systems have some limitations in their ability to create complex schemes."
• "With the next generation of systems, or the next, companies could be run by AI systems," he said. "You could see military campaigns organized by AI systems."
• "If you're building systems that are more powerful than humans, how do humans maintain power over those systems forever? That's the real concern behind the open letter."

convince governments

• The expert stressed that it is necessary to convince governments of the need to start planning for the future when "we need to change the way our entire digital ecosystem works."
• Since its release last year, Microsoft OpenAI-powered ChatGPT has urged competitors to accelerate development of similar large language models and encouraged companies to integrate generative AI models into their products.