AI Will Have A "Bigger Economic Impact Than The Pandemic", Tech CEO Warns

As we have seen in recent months, the possibilities of AI are limitless, and it is only just beginning to be explored. However, as AI development accelerates, experts and leaders in the industry have urged developers and users to be aware of the technology's potential risks.

Recently, a British AI expert shared his predictions for the impacts of AI on human society. Speaking to the BBC, Emad Mostaque, founder of the tech firm, Stability AI, warned that AI could become far more capable than us and ultimately control humanity. He believes that if robots become more capable than humans, democracy could be threatened.

"My personal belief is that it will be like that movie Her with Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, humans are a bit boring and it will be like 'goodbye, you're kind of boring', but I could be wrong.

''It deserves to be discussed in the public sphere, if we have agents more capable than us that we cannot control, that are going across the internet and hooked up and they achieve a level of automation, what does that mean? The worst case scenario is that it proliferates and basically it controls humanity because you could have a million things replicating effectively, but we don't know,'' he said.

He added that governments will need to take action and introduce policies to limit the power of AI, which he says could have a bigger impact on the economy than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the risks, Mr Mostaque said that the potential benefits of AI for almost every part of our lives could be huge. He thinks the jobs which disappear will be replaced by better ones because machines will do menial tasks, allowing us to concentrate on better things. He further said that "it's up to us to decide which direction" this all goes in.

Notably, his company created Stable Diffusion, a tool which uses AI to make images from simple text instructions by analysing pictures found online.

Recently, a computer scientist often dubbed "the godfather of artificial intelligence" quit his job at Google to speak out about the dangers of the technology. He said that the advancements made in the field posed "profound risks to society and humanity".

In March, tech billionaire Elon Musk and a range of experts called for a pause in the development of AI systems to allow time to make sure they are safe. An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was prompted by the release of GPT-4, a much more powerful version of the technology used by ChatGPT.

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