The great AI slowdown and what we should do now
Some of the people closest to the development of AI are now calling for it to slow down. That should matter to every business, and there are purposeful questions we should all be asking as AI marches forward, writes our director Patrick Steen.
I’m sure you’ve read the headlines around the resignation of Jacob Coxon from Anthropic. He did so citing that people working in AI companies were “genuinely frightened” about where the technology is heading, warning that the next year or two could be “crunch time for humanity”.
He has also put a percentage estimate on AI causing human extinction. Anything above 0% should be of concern to us all.
We all have power to question AI
We can all feel powerless to this while we might use ChatGPT and Claude for meaningful or meaningless work, but we all have power. Businesses have even more power.
It’s actually heartening to see the voice of one individual launch a global conversation on the ethics of AI. Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, followed with an essay calling for AI development to slow down. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk have also responded with agreement on the need to slow the pace. The markets responded negatively, and Donald Trump alongside Nvidia’s Jensen Huang downplayed the risks, citing competition with China and that new laws aren’t necessary.
In the UK, the Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report calling for a new bill on AI to “address the scale and seriousness” of the threats posed to human rights.
AI companies may understand that the march to ‘super-intelligent’ AI comes with increasingly greater risks, but they are also under huge commercial pressure to develop them faster. Coxon argues that, without much stronger regulation or cooperation between the major players, the race itself could make it harder for any individual company to slow down.
Businesses must ask responsible AI questions
The responsibility to think through the ethical questions of AI does not stop with the companies building the models. It matters for businesses adopting them too.
I expect the percentage of businesses adopting AI tools is starting to near 100%, and so they too need to start asking these social, political and ethical questions themselves.
They need to ask whether they will be engaging in dialogue with their employees on the roll-out of AI tools. Ultimately AI is going to start affecting our jobs (it already is), and companies need to ask these questions quickly. The environmental impact, and now the quite concerning societal impacts should be at the top of executive and board conversations.
With great power comes great responsibility
AI is set to become one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever seen. We all have a responsibility to ensure we take the right path from now, even when we ourselves might feel powerless. These are questions I’ve long been thinking about since my Philosophy degree in the 2000s, but we urgently all need to start forming answers over the next two years at the rate AI development is moving.
For businesses, that means asking questions about ethics, equity and the environment. (A triplet that AI didn’t write on this occasion.) That’s why it’s good to see the Gates Foundation committing $1bn to expanding equitable AI access.
What interests me most about the current debate is that it is no longer only critics outside the industry asking these questions. They are increasingly being asked by the people building the technology itself. Businesses adopting AI should probably be asking them too.
Our Purposeful AI work helps organisations understand the ethical, social and environmental risks of AI, and put practical frameworks in place so its use aligns with their values.
