Australia faces choices about the technological development since the splitting of the atom in the 1930s.
The threat of AI to the existence of humanity has long been raised.
As if people didn’t have enough to worry about with the cost of living, shortage of housing, climate change, resulting mental health issues, the drift to rightwing populism and fraying of democracy, now this.
The Anthropic chief executive, Dario Amodei, has said that rogue AI agents, like those from OpenAI that escaped their test environment in July, are “capable of taking over the entire internet” within six to 12 months.
Agentic AI is also capable of doing much good, including, among other things, identifying network vulnerabilities, responding nimbly to threats and threading knowledge across sectors.
A new study from MIT FutureTech and the University of Queensland identifies five risks as the most likely to produce the most severe harms; capabilities, competitive pressures, weapons and cyber-attacks, concentrated power and false information: “Under the business-as-usual scenario, experts judged that 18 of the 24 AI risk domains had at least a 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes over the next five years.”
The researchers emphasise the need to treat AI as a new paradigm with “ecosystem-wide, society-wide opportunities and vulnerabilities.”
The Albanese government has recently taken some initial steps but, as Western Australian independent Kate Chaney notes in her recent discussion paper on AI, Australia has done “remarkably little to prepare” not for what’s coming but what’s already here.
The US president, Donald Trump, meanwhile, who will meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in Washington this week, says: “We’re leading China on AI...”