AI overlords say they want to democratise their technology. Here’s how |
What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses.
On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted. A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal. Both declined.
Bill Gates, meanwhile, has warned that AI in the wrong hands could “cause a billion deaths”. “No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” he said.
Days before, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, the chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI, appeared before the UN security council. Amodei warned that AI could become “a risk to humanity as a whole”. Altman said that “if AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone”.
Doomsday scenarios aside, AI is already disrupting schools, workplaces and public services, with the most marginalised often feeling the impacts harder and faster. If democracy is to matter in this era of tech power, surely we must try to democratise AI. But how?
Utah offers a glimpse. Proposals for a datacentre more than twice the size of Manhattan provoked a furious backlash over energy use and the potential impact on the state’s stressed water supplies and Great Salt Lake........