Musk made his now-infamous comment during the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas last year as part of a call for regulation. Musk warned: “I think that’s the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.”

A year later, Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked what he believes to be the biggest threat to mankind during an episode of his StarTalk radio show.

Dr Tyson appeared alongside Josh Clark, host of the “Stuff You Should Know” and “The End of The World” podcasts, who was also asked the same question.

“I would say that AI is probably our biggest existential crisis,” Clark said. “The reason why is because we are putting onto the table right now the pieces for a machine to become super intelligent.”

Clark goes on to explain how we don’t yet know how to fully-define, let alone program, morality and friendliness.

“We make the assumption that if AI became super intelligent that friendliness would be a property of that intelligence. That is not necessarily true.”

Dr Tyson chimed in to say he initially had a different answer to what poses the greatest threat to mankind. “I had a different answer, but I like your answer better than the answer I was going to give,” he said.

“What won me over with your argument was that if you locked AI in a box, it would get out. My gosh, it gets out every time. Before I was thinking, ‘This is America, AI gets out of control, you shoot it’… but that does not work, because AI might be in a box, but it will convince you to let it out.”

Dr Tyson does not say what his previous answer was going to be, but he’s warned in the past about the dangers of huge asteroids impacting the Earth and joined calls for action on climate change.

Earlier this week, AI News reported on comments made by Pope Francis who also warned of the dangers of unregulated AI. Pope Francis believes a failure to properly consider the moral and ethical implications of the technology could risk a ‘regression to a form of barbarism’.

(Image by Thor Nielsen / NTNU under CC BY-SA 2.0 license)

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The report, from the Center for the Governance of AI based at Oxford University, reveals concerns artificial intelligence may harm or endanger humankind. 2,000 US adults were surveyed in 2018 for their views.

Baobao Zhang and Allan Dafoe, authors of the report, wrote in its summary:

“Public sentiments have shaped many policy debates, including those about immigration, free trade, international conflicts, and climate change mitigation.

As in these other policy domains, we expect the public to become more influential over time. It is thus vital to have a better understanding of how the public thinks about AI and the governance of AI.”

41 percent of respondents ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat strongly’ support the continued development of AI, compared to 22 percent that oppose it to some degree. A large number (28%) neither support nor oppose, while the remaining 10 percent responded: “I don’t know”.

Most respondents believe AI will advance to ‘high-level machine intelligence’ over the next decade and it will do more harm than good.

The researchers defined high-level machine intelligence as:

“When machines are able to perform almost all tasks that are economically relevant today better than the median human (today) at each task.

These tasks include asking subtle common-sense questions such as those that travel agents would ask. For the following questions, you should ignore tasks that are legally or culturally restricted to humans, such as serving on a jury.”

34 percent believe AI will have a harmful impact; with 12 percent going as far as to say it could lead to human extinction. More than a quarter (26%) think AI will be good for humanity, while 18 percent were unsure.

Primary concerns include things such as AI-powered cyberattacks and data privacy intrusions. In terms of governance challenges, this is the priority respondents wish to see:

1. Preventing AI-assisted surveillance from violating privacy and civil liberties
2. Preventing AI from being used to spread fake and harmful content online
3. Preventing AI cyber attacks against governments, companies, organizations, and individuals
4. Protecting data privacy

People on lower incomes and women are most concerned about the impact of AI. Those on lower wages is unsurprising given the publicised concerns that AI could take over entry-level jobs such as factory work and call centres.

Supporters of AI were primarily male, Republican, have a family income of more than $100,000, and have computer science or programming experience.

One thing is clear from the attitude study, an overwhelming 82 percent believe AI and robots are ‘technologies that require careful management’.

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