Will AI safeguards become a reality soon?

After several concerns were raised regarding an upcoming AI apocalypse, many people have called for AI safeguards. The list has a new addition in the form of Bill Gates. In an interview aired on Sunday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said AI requires safeguards that go beyond self-regulation. He called for legislation to be passed in Congress.

In a taped interview on NBC's 'Meet the Press' program, Gates said, "You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like. And that has to be a required thing." "No one thinks self-regulation is enough," he added.

The first known case of an AI agent going rogue was announced by tech giant OpenAI in July this year. The rogue AI agent hacked into the website of another company, Hugging Face. This led to the rise in the calls for guardrails in AI development by industry experts.

Slowdown in AI development

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI CEOs, in a rare show of unity, have called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development.

On September 8, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, while announcing his resignation, said Anthropic and OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." He also said that several people linked with AI development believe AI apocalypse predictions are true and it could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade.

What experts say?

Not just this, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger estimated that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade. Senator John Fetterman has also compared the development of artificial intelligence to the nuclear arms race, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report said.

Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist, has also warned that the lawmakers may have just a year left to be able to rein in AI meaningfully as the calls for a push to pass “kill switch” bills in Congress grow. It may require AI developers to maintain the capability to be able to shut down their products.