Top US CEOs sound alarm, say AI can destroy humanity in 5 to 10 years

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has caused both excitement and consternation among tech enthusiasts and businessmen. Though one can’t deny the merits of AI, there are still, concerns about the profound impacts it may have on humans.

This notion was recently expressed by top CEOs in the United States who said that the AI could pose an existential threat to humanity in the next 5 to 10 years.

In a poll conducted during the Yale CEO Summit this week, 42 per cent of the top business honchos have said that AI can wipe out humanity.

The responses came from 119 CEOs from a cross-section of business, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy, the leaders of IT companies like Xerox and Zoom as well as CEOs from pharmaceutical, media and manufacturing, CNN reported.

‘It's pretty dark and alarming’

“It’s pretty dark and alarming,” Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told CNN, while talking about the findings.

Sonnenfeld’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute found that business leaders displayed a sharp divide over just how dangerous AI is to civilisation.

The findings stated that 34 per cent of CEOs said AI could potentially destroy humanity in 10 years, while 8 per cent said that it could happen in five years. A majority of 58 per cent, surveyed said that they are “not worried” about it.

In a separate question, around 42 per cent of the CEOs surveyed said that potential catastrophe of AI is overstated, while 58 per cent said it is not overstated, the Yale findings revealed.

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Extinction risk

The development comes a few weeks after dozens of tech leaders, academics and some celebrities sounded alarm over the potential “extinction” risk from AI.

In a statement signed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—the creator of GPT—Geoffrey Hinton, called the “godfather of AI” and top executives from Google and Microsoft, called for society to take steps to guard against the dangers of AI.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," a group of scientists and tech industry leaders said in astatementthat was posted on the Center for AI Safety's website.

This came after a separate statement in March and now signed by more than 30,000 people, where tech executives and researchers called for a six-month pause on training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, the latest version of the ChatGPT chatbot.

"Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources," the letter warned.

(With inputs from agencies)

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