In a recent address at the Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., Mira Murati, the Chief Technology Officer at artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI, issued a stark warning about the potential dangers of improperly programmed AI systems.
She cautioned that such systems could become "extremely addictive," potentially leading to a form of human enslavement.
Murati, 34, emphasized the "significant risk" associated with programming AI inappropriately. "With the capability and this enhanced capability comes the other side, the possibility that we design them in the wrong way and they become extremely addictive and we sort of become enslaved to them," she stated, as reported by the Epoch Times.
The OpenAI executive underscored the need for further research to identify and mitigate the risks associated with addictive technology. She suggested that understanding how people respond to potential addictions is a critical aspect of this research. "We really dont know out of the box. We have to discover, we have to learn, and we have to explore," she asserted.
Murati also highlighted the importance of weighing the benefits and risks of AI technology. "I think about it in terms of trade-offs: How much value is this technology providing in the real world and how much we mitigate the risks," she added.
In a subsequent interview, Murati elaborated on the ultimate goal of aligning AI with human values. "You don't want to get it wrong; it could be very dangerous. This is where reinforcement learning with human feedback was developed," she noted. She explained that the aim was to ensure that AI systems are aligned with human values and can receive and respond to human feedback appropriately.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a substantial investment in OpenAI, aimed at accelerating AI breakthroughs and ensuring their benefits are shared widely. "We want to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world," the tech giant stated in a blog post.
Microsoft outlined several key areas for advancing AI technology, including enhancing functions across applications and leveraging OpenAI's existing technology to develop future apps. The company also expressed its commitment to continue "supercomputing at scale," which it believes will "increase investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAIs groundbreaking independent AI research."
Murati's comments serve as a sobering reminder of the potential risks associated with AI technology, even as companies like Microsoft invest heavily in its development. As AI continues to evolve, the need for careful programming and alignment with human values becomes increasingly critical.
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