"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
That is the succinct statement on AI risk that was released on May 30 this year and signed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Bill Gates, Ilya Sutskever, Audrey Tang, Stuart Russell, Mustafa Suleyman, Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer, Martin Rees, Jaan Tallinn, Max Tegmark, Hilary Greaves, Paul Christiano, Ajeya Cotra, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Dan Hendrycks, myself and a few hundred other leading thinkers in the AI sphere.
Our statement was quoted in full - and in a way that, although it does not explicitly signify endorsement, indicates the need to take it seriously - by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in her State of the Union Address on September 13.
The world is finally waking up to the extreme danger we are facing from AI.
