If AI has a one-in-five chance of destroying us, what do we do with the remaining four?

WHEN Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over the industry’s disregard for artificial intelligence risk, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei published an essay outlining how and why industry and government must come together to pace frontier AI development before it slips beyond human control.

The response was unusual. Competitors who seldom see eye to eye expressed immediate agreement: OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed the industry must “pace the frontier”, Elon Musk offered his clear endorsement and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis called it the right path.

Geoffrey Hinton, a renowned computer scientist called the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”, had previously estimated a 10 to 20 per cent chance that advanced AI could end humanity within the next 30 years.