"Statement on AI Risk"

In May 2023, the non-profit Center for AI Safety (CAIS), whose mission is to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence, issued a press release to discuss its signed “single sentence statement” on AI extinction risk: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Most notably, in a somewhat historic first for public interest engagement around a specific technology, the original single sentence statement has been signed by a wide coalition of experts including but not limited to Turing prize winners, chief executives of key AI research organizations including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, nuclear physicists, politicians, ethicists, legal scholars, economists, and philosophers. As part of the release, CAIS emphasizes the need for proactive, preemptive expert engagement and an urgency around planning to mitigate the potential risks to humanity at-scale. This is a good example of how current technologists and future public interest technologists can, in practice, consider the impact of their work; with a broad view that includes the margins of society (by way of public survey data similar to what CAIS used here) and engagement of a wide coalition of experts to address public interest issues upfront, before risks manifest into reality.

Reference Source: https://www.safe.ai/press-release