"They may be responsible for creating the AI tech that many fear will wipe out jobs - if not the entire human race - but at least they feel just as paranoid and miserable about where this is all going as the rest of us. At NeurIPS, one of the big AI research conferences, held this year at the San Diego Convention, visions of AI doom were clearly on the mind of many scientists in attendance."
""Many AI developers are thinking about the technology's most tangible problems while public conversations about AI - including those among the most prominent developers themselves - are dominated by imagined ones," Reisner wrote. One researcher guilty of this? University of Montreal researcher Yoshua Bengio, one the three so-called "godfathers" of AI whose work was foundational to creating the large language models propelling the industry's indefatigable boom."
NeurIPS attendees expressed intense worry about AI's future, frequently framing concerns around catastrophic scenarios and the potential emergence of artificial general intelligence. Many researchers emphasized long-term existential and political risks, including AI deception and misuse to influence public opinion. Attention to present, concrete harms was limited, with scant focus on deepfake video impacts, chatbot-driven mental-health problems, and the erosion of arts and humanities. Prominent researchers who advocate safety have launched initiatives to guide development, yet their public remarks often prioritized speculative threats over addressing existing social, cultural, and mental-health consequences arising from current AI systems.
Read at Futurism
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