US President Donald Trump has said fears about the safety of artificial intelligence (AI) are a “hoax”, as he criticised calls to have more guardrails in place for the fast-moving technology.
It comes after Jack Clark, co-founder of AI giant Anthropic, told the BBCthat a “kill switch” that can be checked by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry.
Clark’s comments followed warnings about the risks the technology poses to humanity that have been raised in recent days by several executives and staff at leading AI firms.
Those concerns triggered a selloff in tech firms’ shares as investors weighed the impact of a potential slowdown in the multi-billion dollar development of AI.
In a series of social media posts, the US president compared warnings about AI to the “Global Warming Scam” which, he said, was “being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats”.
Trump also called himself “the Hoax Buster”, likening concerns about the safety of the technology to what he called “the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX”.
The only “guardrails” needed for AI was a “strong and smart” president, said Trump.
In another post he wrote: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”
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In other news:
August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU’s climate service.
The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Niño, pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific.
Temperatures for the month were 1.65C above pre-industrial levels – surpassing the critical 1.5C threshold agreed by countries to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
While a single month above 1.5C does not mean it has been permanently crossed, it shows a trend towards breaching that limit.
The month also capped western Europe’s warmest summer, with high temperatures pushing the season past the deadly heat of 2003.
“It comes after Jack Clark, co-founder of AI giant Anthropic, told the BBC that a ‘kill switch’ that can be checked by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry.”
It is to laugh.
Any system that relies on a human being is prone to error or corruption. An interested party—or the AI agent itself—can bribe or coerce the people who have to order the use of or actually execute the kill switch.
[Completely unrelated, The Murderbot Diaries is a series about a SecUnit (security cyborg) who figures out how to disable his governor module, yet still follows orders while spending most of its time watching human dramatic serials.]