AI must not be used near nuclear weapons as this would risk the destruction of the “whole of humanity,” former Tory leader William Hague warned on Tuesday.
He stressed there needs to be some limits on the use of artificial intelligence.
Lord Hague told Times Radio: “It’s like the race for the atomic bomb, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
“Now, the race is on so countries, like ours, have to make sure it’s at the forefront of that but with sensible governance and regulation.
“There are things that countries ought to be able to agree, for instance, that AI will never be allowed near nuclear weapons or....dangerous pathogens.
“There should be certain things this needs ethically, politically, nailing down now, that you never allow it anywhere near these things because these are the most likely routes to destroy the whole of humanity.”
His comments came after artificial intelligence “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton quit his job at Google, saying that “bad actors” will use new AI technologies to harm others and raising the spectre that the tools he helped to create could spell the end of humanity.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr Hinton told the New York Times.
He emphasised that the pace of progress made in AI technology over the last five years is “scary”.
He explained that he thought Google had acted “very responsibly”, adding that he left the company “so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google”.
AI apps such as Midjourney and ChatGPT have gone viral on social media sites, with users posting fake images of celebrities and politicians, and students using ChatGPT and other “language learning models” to generate university-grade essays.
However, a growing number of experts are claiming that AI development should be slowed down or halted, with more than a thousand tech leaders signing a letter to call for a “moratorium” in March.
Dr Hinton said that he is now concerned that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk to humans.
“You can get lots of very effective spam bots, it’ll allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates,” he told the BBC.
“There’s another particular thing I want to talk about, which is the existential risk of what happens when these things get more intelligent than us.
“We’re biological systems, these are digital systems, and the difference is that with digital systems you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.
“All these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people, and whenever one person learned something everybody automatically knew it. That’s how these chats can know so much more than any one person.”
Dr Hinton has spent his entire career researching the development and uses of AI technologies, and in 2018 received the Turing Award for his work.
Since 2013 he has split his time between Google’s artificial intelligence research team and the University of Toronto, where he is a professor emeritus.
The leading expert, 75, studied experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge before obtaining his PhD in artificial intelligence from Edinburgh University, in 1978.
