The Protesters Who Want To Ban AGI Before It Even Exists

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: On Saturday at the Silverstone Cafe in San Francisco, a smattering of activists gathered to discuss plans to stop the further advancement of artificial intelligence. The name of their non-violent civil resistance group, STOP AI, makes its mission clear. The organization wants to ban something that, by most accounts, doesn't yet exist -- artificial general intelligence, or AGI, defined by OpenAI as 'highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.'

STOP AI outlines a broader set of goals on its website. For example, 'We want governments to force AI companies to shut down everything related to the creation of general-purpose AI models, destroy any existing general-purpose AI model, and permanently ban their development.' In answer to the question 'Does STOP AI want to ban all AI?', the group's answer is, 'Not necessarily, just whatever is necessary to keep humanity alive.' The group, which has held protests outside OpenAI's office and plans another outside the company's San Francisco HQ on February 22, has bold goal: rally support from 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, or 11 million people. That's the so-called 'tipping point' needed for societal change, based on research by political scientist Erica Chenoweth.

'The implications of artificial general intelligence are so immense and dangerous that we just don't want that to come about ever,' said Finn van der Velde, an AI safety advocate and activist with a technical background in computer science and AI specifically. 'So what that will practically mean is that we will probably need an international treaty where the governments across the board agree that we don't build AGI. And so that means disbanding companies like OpenAI that specifically have the goal to build AGI.' It also means regulating compute power so that no one will be able to train an AGI model.

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