Sanders Sets Briefing on 'Extraordinary Dangers' Posed by Breakneck AI Development

US Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to convene a bipartisan hearing next week focusing on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, a move that comes amid more warnings from experts about the potentially existential threats posed by unregulated AI development.

Axios reported Wednesday that Sanders (I-Vt.) will hold the September 16 hearing on what he called the "extraordinary dangers" posed by AI as a growing chorus of scientists and technology insiders warns that the race toward ever-more-powerful systems—which will likely one day surpass and then far exceed human brainpower—could ultimately threaten humanity's survival.

The briefing is set to feature three experts: Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called the “godfather of AI;" Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute; and Ajeya Cotra, an AI safety researcher who recently helped investigate OpenAI's agents autonomously hacking the open-source software platform Hugging Face.

Hinton—who quit Google in 2023 so he could speak more freely about AI's dangers—has estimated that there is a 10–20% chance AI could cause human extinction within three decades. He has warned of the great difficulty of controlling increasingly intelligent machines that will likely one day achieve superintelligence and ultimately be beyond the ability of humans to control. Hinton has repeatedly argued that relying on profit-driven corporations to self-regulate AI development is a dangerous mistake.

Tegmark has also spent years sounding the alarm. In 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter signed by more than 30,000 researchers, technologists, and others calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Cotra wrote in a 2022 analysis that unchecked artificial intelligence development would likely lead to a “full-blown AI takeover.” The following year, she said she believed there was roughly a 50% chance AI would be making most important economic and societal decisions by around 2040, while warning that continued scaling of existing techniques could produce misaligned systems and a machine takeover.

Experts say the recent headline-grabbing rogue AI hacks underscore the problem of alignment. As AI advances to the point where it will likely outsmart humans one day, the challenge of ensuring that advanced systems reliably pursue goals that match what humans actually want becomes increasingly difficult—and dangerous.

Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) recently introduced legislation that would ban the creation of AI systems capable of surpassing human cognition and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory framework is established.

"In the interest of humanity... pause AI development," the senator urged tech titans last month. "It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control."