The Growing Push to Ban Superintelligent AI

And on Tuesday, British lawmaker Alex Sobel stood up in the House of Commons and introduced what he said was the first bill seeking to ban superintelligence in any G7 parliament. The bill defines superintelligent AI as a system that could disempower state authorities, and seeks to give the state new powers to monitor and restrict systems that may be “precursors” to superintelligence.

Both the U.S. and U.K. bills additionally seek to compel each government to pursue a global treaty banning the development of superintelligent AI anywhere in the world. “A national bill does not solve the international problem where superintelligence can be developed somewhere else,” says Andrea Miotti, the founder of ControlAI, a campaign group that wrote the U.K. bill and consulted on the U.S. one. “The only way to address that is via international agreements between countries.”

At an event in Westminster on Monday ahead of the British bill’s introduction, Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, issued a stark warning to a small audience including some U.K. lawmakers. “There’s a significant chance of a Chernobyl-sized catastrophe” due to AI, he told them, “such as a coordinated sabotage of financial systems, communication systems, or electrical grids, that directly or indirectly would cost millions of lives and cause the economic collapse of many countries.”