As AI systems grow more powerful, some of their creators are trying to estimate the odds of the technology's darkest possible outcomes: human extinction.
Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has before put the chance of AI causing human extinction within the next 30 years at between 10 and 20 per cent.
Dr Chaitanya Joshi, a senior lecturer in statistics at Adelaide University, said the figures should not be confused with probabilities calculated from historical data.
Noetel for example, co-authored a study released this year which used a structured process known as the Delphi method to survey 272 AI experts from 37 countries.
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Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has before put the chance of AI causing human extinction within the next 30 years at between 10 and 20 per cent.
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As AI systems grow more powerful, some of their creators are trying to estimate the odds of the technology's darkest possible outcomes: human extinction.
Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment research at AI company Anthropic, recently said he believed there was a greater than 10 per cent chance AI "could kill all humans" within the next decade.
Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has before put the chance of AI causing human extinction within the next 30 years at between 10 and 20 per cent.
A newly released survey of 1,580 researchers who had published at leading AI events found respondents assigned an average 18 per cent chance that future AI advances could lead to human extinction or similar permanent or disempowerment of humanity. The median estimate was 10 per cent.
Dr Chaitanya Joshi, a senior lecturer in statistics at Adelaide University, said the figures should not be confused with probabilities calculated from historical data.
Joshi said that meant people should consider not only an expert's estimate, but also the reliability of their expertise and the level of uncertainty surrounding it.
Associate Professor Michael Noetel from the University of Queensland said the subjective nature of these estimates did not however render them meaningless.
Noetel for example, co-authored a study released this year which used a structured process known as the Delphi method to survey 272 AI experts from 37 countries.
Under current trajectories, the experts judged 18 of 24 categories of AI risk as having at least a 10 per cent probability of causing outcomes within five years.
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