Leading AI pioneer Stuart Russell has talked about the race to create superintelligent systems leading to a situation where almost the entire global population could be without work. Russell is a UC Berkeley professor and has also co authored the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is considered one of the most authoritative texts in the field.
Speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Russell said the trajectory of current AI development is “appalling” and driven less by public interest than by private greed and geopolitical pressure.
“AI systems are doing pretty much everything we currently call work,” Russell said on the podcast.
“Anything you might aspire to — you want to become a surgeon — it takes the robot seven seconds to learn how to be a surgeon that’s better than any human being,” he added.
AI companies are playing Russian roulette with the lives of people
“They are playing Russian roulette with every human being on Earth… without our permission,” he said about the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence. “They’re coming into our houses, putting a gun to the head of our children, pulling the trigger, and saying, ‘Well, you know, possibly everyone will die. Oops. But possibly we’ll get incredibly rich.’”
While much of the public conversation around AI replacing workers has centred on blue collar jobs like factory workers, drivers and customer support agents, Russell argues that even senior executives like CEOs may not be spared by the upcoming onslaught.
He imagines a fictitious scenario where the board of a company tells its CEO: “Well, you know, unless you turn over your decision making power to the AI system, we’re going to have to fire you because all our competitors are using an AI powered CEO and they’re doing much better.”
Notably, this is not the first time that a senior figure in the AI industry has said that an AI could take over the job of CEO. Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have echoed this sentiment in the last few months.
“I think what a CEO does is maybe one of the easier things for an AI to do one day,” Pichai told the BBC in an interview.
“Shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO,” Altman had said in an interaction.
With AI taking most of the work in such a scenario, Russell says humans would have to reinvent what meaning looks like for them.
“We need to figure out what the next phase is going to be like and, in particular, how in that world we have the incentives to become fully human,” he said.
