AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says pioneer
A pioneer of AI has criticised calls to grant the technology rights, warning that it was showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be prepared to pull the plug if needed.Yoshua Bengio said giving legal status to cutting-edge AIs would be akin to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials, amid fears that advances in the technology were far outpacing the ability to constrain them.Bengio, chair of a leading international AI safety study, said the growing perception that chatbots were becoming conscious was “going to drive bad decisions”.The Canadian computer scientist also expressed concern that AI models – the technology that underpins tools like chatbots – were showing signs of self-preservation, such as trying to disable oversight systems.A core concern among AI safety campaigners is that powerful systems could develop the capability to evade guardrails and harm humans.
“People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” said Bengio.“Frontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we’re not allowed to shut them down.“As their capabilities and degree of agency grow, we need to make sure we can rely on technical and societal guardrails to control them, including the ability to shut them down if needed.”As AIs become more advanced in their ability to act autonomously and perform “reasoning” tasks, a debate has grown over whether humans should, at some point, grant them rights.A poll by the Sentience Institute, a US thinktank that supports the moral rights of all sentient beings, found that nearly four in 10 US adults backed legal rights for a sentient AI system.
Anthropic, a leading US AI firm, said in August that it was letting its Claude Opus 4 model close down potentially “distressing” conversations with users, saying it needed to protect the AI’s “welfare”.Elon Musk, whose xAI company has developed the Grok chatbot, wrote on his X platform that “torturing AI is not OK”.Robert Long, a researcher on AI consciousness, has said “if and when AIs develop moral status, we should ask them about their experiences and preferences rather than assuming we know best”.Bengio told the Guardian there were “real scientific properties of consciousness” in the human brain that machines could, in theory, replicate – but humans interacting with chatbots wasa “different thing”.He said this was because people tended to assume – without evidence – that an AI was fully conscious in the same way a human is.
“People wouldn’t care what kind of mechanisms are going on inside the AI,” he added.“What they care about is it feels like they’re talking to an intelligent entity that has their own personality and goals.That is why there are so many people who are becoming attached to their AIs.“There will be people who will always say: ‘Whatever you tell me, I am sure it is conscious’ and then others will say the opposite.This is because consciousness is something we have a gut feeling for.
The phenomenon of subjective perception of consciousness is going to drive bad decisions.“Imagine some alien species came to the planet and at some point we realise that they have nefarious intentions for us.Do we grant them citizenship and rights or do we defend our lives?”Responding to Bengio’s comments, Jacy Reese Anthis, who co-founded the Sentience Institute, said humans would not be able to coexist safely with digital minds if the relationship was one of control and coercion.Anthis added: “We could over-attribute or under-attribute rights to AI, and our goal should be to do so with careful consideration of the welfare of all sentient beings.Neither blanket rights for all AI nor complete denial of rights to any AI will be a healthy approach.
”Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, earned the “godfather of AI” nickname after winning the 2018 Turing award, seen as the equivalent of a Nobel prize for computing.He shared it with Geoffrey Hinton, who later won a Nobel, and Yann LeCun, the outgoing chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Waitrose urges customers not to drink Deeside water over shards of glass risk
Waitrose customers are being urged to return and not drink large bottles of Deeside mineral water over fears they could contain shards of glass.The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has issued a consumer alert over the still and sparkling 750ml bottles of Waitrose No 1 Deeside mineral water because of the possibility of glass fragments, making them unsafe to drink.The potentially contaminated mineral waters, which are bottled specially for Waitrose from a spring near Balmoral Castle in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park, cost about £1.60 each in store.The supermarket has removed the bottles from its shelves and customers who have already bought them are being asked to call the retailer or return the product in person to get their money back
Eurostar slowly resumes but passengers face more cancellations and delays
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Tesla publishes analyst forecasts suggesting sales set to fall
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Tell us: have you trained your AI job replacement?
Analysis by the International Monetary Fund says Artificial intelligence will affect about 40% of jobs around the world.We’d like to find out more about the impact of AI on jobs now. With this in mind, we want to hear from people who have been training AI to replace their current roles. What has the experience been like? How do you feel about your future at your company? Do you have concerns?Tell us all about it in the form below or by messaging us. Please include as much detail as possible
Diggins, Schumacher make US cross-country skiing history with World Cup double
American cross-country skiing reached a milestone on Wednesday when, for the first time, an American man and an American woman won World Cup races on the same day.Gus Schumacher and Jessie Diggins delivered the historic double at stage three of the Tour de Ski in Toblach, Italy, both prevailing in a newly introduced 5km heat mass start free event that rewarded speed, pacing and collective tactics rather than head-to-head positioning.Schumacher set the tone in the men’s race, skating aggressively from the outset in a format that split the field into staggered heats, with final placings determined by time. The 25-year-old crossed the line in 9:35.4 to secure only the second World Cup victory of his career, edging Austria’s Benjamin Moser by two-tenths of a second
Harry Randall and buoyant Bristol keen to carry form into new year
Harry Randall and Bristol enter the new year with high hopes. The scrum-half has returned to fitness ahead of schedule after hamstring surgery and marked his 150th Bears appearance in the win against Newcastle last Saturday.Pat Lam’s side approach the Prem encounter with Sale at Ashton Gate on Friday after five straight victories, sitting fourth in the table, their attractive style having clicked. A fresh assault on the playoffs looks likely.Randall played a part in England’s winning tour to the Americas last summer – and a return to club action is a chance to restate his case for international selection before the Six Nations
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