South Korea wants free ‘AI for All’. Is society ready for it?

In Silicon Valley and beyond, the architects of artificial intelligence are increasingly warning about the risks it poses to humanity.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants the industry to slow down. A former engineer at his company, who also worked at its rival OpenAI, told reporters after quitting earlier this month that he was “genuinely frightened” unchecked AI development might mean “we could all die in the immediate future”.

Even Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI”, has warned of the existential threat posed by the technology should it escape human control.

Concerns about AI run the gamut from autonomous weapons, mass unemployment and machine-driven cyberattacks to deepfake-fuelled misinformation, algorithmic bias and a dangerous overreliance on automation.