AI Superintelligence Is Not a Tool, It’s an Adversary Threatening Humanity: ControlAI’s Connor Leahy

Sixty-nine-year-old Wynd Kaufmyn, a retired teacher from Berkeley, California, is believed to be the first person imprisoned for protesting the development of artificial intelligence, after she and other members of the group StopAI were arrested during a sit-in protest at the headquarters of OpenAI. Democracy Now! reached Kaufmyn at the San Francisco County Jail, where she is now serving a two-week sentence for charges including “interfering with a business.” Kaufmyn says she participated in the protest because “This technology is fueling a dystopian level of surveillance. It’s fueling a fascist state. It’s going to take all of our jobs. It’s already taken many of them. It’s causing suicides, homicides and mass shootings. This needs to stop.”

Another group, named ControlAI, has made it a mission to brief lawmakers on “adversarial” threats from unchecked emergent technologies. We speak to ControlAI’s executive director, Connor Leahy, who first came to national prominence for reverse-engineering OpenAI’s GPT-2 model in his college dorm room in 2019. “Even though I was able to build such an AI system, I was not able to understand it,” says Leahy, who warns against the development of autonomous so-called superintelligence and calls for governments to “criminalize the creation of superintelligence the same way that it is illegal to build a nuclear bomb.”