The global competition to dominate artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch, but one of the world’s leading computer scientists warned that Big Tech is recklessly gambling with the future of the human species.
The loudest voices in AI often fall into two camps: those who praise the technology as world-changing, and those who urge restraint—or even containment—before it becomes a runaway threat. Stuart Russell, a pioneering AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, firmly belongs to the latter group. One of his chief concerns is that governments and regulators are struggling to keep pace with the technology’s rapid rollout, leaving the private sector locked in a race to the finish that risks devolving into the kind of perilous competition not seen since the height of the Cold War.
