Sky News reports:
AI more urgent threat than climate change, scientist warns
AI could "any day now create a catastrophe" and must be considered an immediate threat.
That's according to astrophysicist Martin Rees, who told Sky News why it differs from climate change and "needs to be tackled more urgently":
"Climate change is a real phenomenon and, if it's unchecked for 50 or 100 years, it will change the biosphere and the climate in most countries substantially. But it won't kill us all. And, it's not going to happen in a drastic way in a few years."
Rees, who co-founded Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, also described what he considered realistic scenarios of AI causing disasters in the near future.
At last, someone talking sense about the relative importance to humanity of climate-change versus the rise of AI.
Climate change has been around forever and even if we get to zero-carbon, climate change will continue because we do not control the climate. It is managed by much bigger forces like the sun and the earth's rotation for example.
AI has only been around for a few decades and is already a bigger threat to humanity than climate change ever has been, bar a few ice ages, or is right now. And AI is also not under our control. And it could kill us all.
A key problem with both climate change and AI is they have created industries around them which have become 'too big to fail' with all those massive investments in 'green energy' and 'data centres'.
Rees's comment highlights the essential difference between an important and an urgent issue in terms of existential threats to humanity.
Mitigating the impact of ongoing climate change is important.
Controlling the scale, scope and spread of AI is urgent.