China warns of synthetic intelligence dangers, requires beefed-up nationwide safety measures

China’s ruling Communist Occasion is asking for beefed-up nationwide safety measures, highlighting the dangers posed by advances in synthetic intelligence.

A gathering headed by occasion chief and President Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged “devoted efforts to safeguard political safety and enhance the safety governance of web information and synthetic intelligence,” the official Xinhua Information Company stated.

Xi, who’s China‘s head of state, commander of the army and chair of the occasion’s Nationwide Safety Fee, known as on the assembly for “staying keenly conscious of the sophisticated and difficult circumstances going through nationwide safety.”

China wants a “new sample of improvement with a brand new safety structure,” Xinhua reported Xi as saying.

China already dedicates huge sources to suppressing any perceived political threats to the occasion’s dominance, with spending on the police and safety personnel exceeding that dedicated to the army.

Whereas it relentlessly censors in-person protests and on-line criticism, residents have continued to precise dissatisfaction with insurance policies, most lately the draconian lockdown measures enacted to fight the unfold of COVID-19.

China has been cracking down on its tech sector in an effort to reassert occasion management, however like different international locations it’s scrambling to search out methods to control the growing know-how.

Worries about synthetic intelligence techniques outsmarting people and slipping uncontrolled have intensified with the rise of a brand new technology of extremely succesful AI chatbots equivalent to ChatGPT.

Scientists and tech business leaders, together with high-level executives at Microsoft and Google, issued a brand new warning Tuesday in regards to the perils that synthetic intelligence poses to humankind.

“Mitigating the chance of extinction from AI ought to be a worldwide precedence alongside different societal-scale dangers equivalent to pandemics and nuclear warfare,” the assertion stated.

Greater than 1,000 researchers and technologists, together with Elon Musk, who’s at present on a go to to China, had signed a for much longer letter earlier this 12 months calling for a six-month pause on AI improvement.

The missive stated AI poses “profound dangers to society and humanity,” and a few concerned within the matter have proposed a United Nations treaty to control the know-how.