The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow “a man [to] carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city”.
From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the backrooms of Davos, political leaders, tech moguls and academics exult in the immense benefits that AI will bring, but fear that it may also herald humanity’s demise as superintelligent machines come to rule the world.
In 2015, the journalist Steven Levy interviewed Elon Musk and Sam Altman, two founders of OpenAI, the tech company that burst into public consciousness two years ago with the release of ChatGPT, the seemingly human-like chatbot.
A galaxy of Silicon Valley heavyweights, fearful of the potential consequences of AI, created the company as a non-profit-making charitable trust with the aim of developing technology in an ethical fashion to benefit “humanity as a whole”.
It was necessary to be less open, Ilya Sutskever, another of OpenAI’s founders and at the time the company’s chief scientist, claimed in response to criticism, to prevent those with malevolent intent from using it “to cause a great deal of harm”.
“It is unfair to thrust on to unqualified simpletons the responsibility to take historic decisions of great complexity and sophistication,” as Richard Dawkins put it after the Brexit referendum, a sentiment with which Wells would have agreed.
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