AI may design its own successor, need urgent regulation, says Anthropic co-founder

With the advancement of generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI), there is a growing sense of both excitement and uncertainty worldwide. While gen AI can help with improving productivity at work, advanced agentic AI technology is capable of automating several tasks and there high risk of rendering some white collar designations redundant.

By 2030, almost 50 per cent of the entry-level jobs like customer care, tech support and coding will be eliminated by gen AI bots.

There's a bigger danger from AI that humans have to decide by the end of this decade, said Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-founder of Anthropic.

The pace of advancements in gen AI is at breakneck speed, and we are not too far from seeing the rise of Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI). AGIs are a couple of leagues above the agentic AI bots. They can complete a particular task with the least human interference and are capable of producing code for a software application. It can even write text, video, audio and multimedia content on its own.

Kaplan fears that his son, who is six years old now, will not be able to match gen AI in his academic work, like writing essays or solving maths problems.

Anthropic co-founder believes AI can be used to accelerate biomedical research, improve health and cybersecurity, boost productivity, give people more free time and help humans flourish.

However, if gen AI bots begin to think for themselves and make anything devious that has the potential to hurt humans is high.

"If you imagine you create this process where you have an AI that is smarter than you, or about as smart as you, it’s [then] making an AI that’s much smarter. It sounds like a kind of scary process. You don’t know where you end up,” said Kaplain in an interview with The Guardian.

Kaplan warned that decision makers, both the AI companies and government agencies, will have to decide fast on regulations.

With a high possibility of self-learning AI of exceeding human capabilities in scientific research and technological advancement, there is a danger of things falling into to wrong hands.

“It seems very dangerous for it to fall into the wrong hands,” he said. “You can imagine some person [deciding]: ‘I want this AI to just be my slave. I want it to enact my will.’ I think preventing power grabs – preventing misuse of the technology – is also very important.”

Kaplan's concern over the safety of AI tech seems valid and is high time; the government should start chalking out a sensible law for ethical use of AI and curb the misuse of the technology to create deepfakes, which have surged in the recent past.

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