At a lakefront venue in Sweden earlier this month, 18 individuals from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, the U.K. AI Security Institute, the OECD, and other groups gathered for an invite-only summit. On the agenda: arriving at a consensus on the likely ways that advanced AI will impact the “social contract” between working people, governments, and corporations.
Top AI CEOs like DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have recently been urging academics and governments to grapple with this issue more deeply, to better prepare the world for what they expect will be a highly disruptive economic shock.
One outcome of the so-called “AGI social contract summit” was a list of four consensus statements, according to the summit’s organizers. These statements have not previously been reported.
They paint a grim picture of where the world could be headed, absent significant interventions by governments and societies. “AI is likely to exacerbate increasing wealth and income inequality within countries, worsening economic conditions for many working and middle-class people and families,” the first reads.
“AI will increase inequality between countries that have access to AI infrastructure and those that don’t—both in terms of access to benefits as well as ability to respond to shocks,” says the second. “Without intervention, AI-enabled inequalities may lead to the political dominance of wealthy individuals and corporations, eroding democratic institutions and increasing levels of political dissatisfaction,” the third says.
And the fourth: “The encroachment of AI systems and the erosion of the value of labor could lead to the increasing disempowerment of most humans, causing a degradation in individual well-being and purpose.”
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