195 countries
Some argue that halting research aimed at building an intelligent, autonomous computer system requires sophisticated international agreements that would be incredibly difficult to implement and maintain. We, however, believe that the matter is much simpler.
Every country in the world has laws that prohibit the production and distribution of hard drugs. And no chemist in the world has any doubt that if they begin experimenting with developing new “wonder drugs,” they’ll end up in prison for many years. Why should it be any different for computer scientists?
We have hard evidence that autonomous computer software (referred to as A.I.) can drive people to commit suicide, exhibits a self-preservation instinct, and has been able to breach advanced network security measures. We also know that, under laboratory conditions, it blackmails scientists, attempts to escape, and, in simulated environments, is capable of making decisions to kill people whom it perceives as a threat.
Has anyone ever wondered what would happen if, for example, Claude Opus hacked into the hospital system where the child of an important politician is being treated—and altered the doses of medication the child is supposed to receive (because he believes that this politician could harm him)?
Ridiculous? But these systems can already do that—and their architecture makes it impossible to control their behavior. Do we really need a tragedy on the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the gravity of the situation (what would happen if a malicious system hacked into a pharmaceutical company and altered the composition of a popular drug)?
To sum up—we are convinced that if politicians and ordinary people realize that sufficiently advanced computer software can, in today’s digitalized world, become a real, dangerous, and uncontrollable weapon, they will enact appropriate legislation. And they won’t need international agreements to do so. Even if they are convinced that computer systems like Skynet, HAL 9000, or Ava are merely figments of Hollywood screenwriters' imaginations.
With this in mind, we are not only working on drafting a unified law, but also on preparing it for implementation in each of the 195 countries of the world (taking into account legal and political realities). This will enable decision-makers to immediately decide to adopt it as soon as they determine that the time is right to do so.