GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Over the past few days, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI all publicly agreed that it’s time to make everyone slow down before we lose control — including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and X CEO Elon Musk.
When people who profit from something declare that it’s dangerous and needs to be regulated, there’s always reason to be skeptical. But whatever their reason, this is far from the first time AI thought leaders have sounded the alarm.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted author Samuel Butler to warn about intelligent self-replicating machines replacing humans back in 1863 — and in his follow-up 1872 book Erewhon, he describes visiting a fictional society that has already regulated machines out of existence to avoid humanity’s collapse. Computing pioneer Alan Turing famously warned in a 1951 lecture that artificial intelligence would “meet with great opposition,” because undying machines “would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers” and would eventually “take control.”
Calls for intervention, too, aren’t new. In 2000, Sun Microsystems cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy wrote that self-replicating robots could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons, partly because they’re being developed “within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism” rather than in tightly controlled government labs. And in 2009, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz, who now serves as the company’s chief scientific officer, brought leading AI researchers together to consider “creating policies that might constrain or bias the behaviors of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems so as to address concerns.”
But modern AI bigwigs warning that their investments should be controlled? That trend appears to have begun with Elon Musk, who invested earlier than most.
July 2017: Elon Musk says we need to regulate AI before it becomes a danger to humanity
By the time Elon Musk told a gathering of US governors that they needed to regulate AI right away, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO already had skin in the game. He’d already invested $38 million in OpenAI, as well as stakes in at least two other AI companies, and he’d publicly spoken about the dangers of AI for three years.
“AI is a rare case where we need to be proactive about regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late,” Musk told a gathering of US governors at the July 2017 National Governors Association summer meeting. In March 2018, he added: “AI is far more dangerous than nukes. So why do we have no regulatory oversight?”
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