Ronald Craig Arkin

Roboticist and Roboethicist. Professor Emeritus, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing, Georgia Tech

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Heading to Costa Rica in October as part of my role in the IEEE Distinguished Visitor Program for a keynote at IngenIEEEría Costa Rica (https://t.co/ZjleoN6JI5) and invited talks at University of Costa Rica and TEC Costa Rica. Looking forward to it!

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

https://t.co/pmAohA1bSJ

Some recent PR on a new DARPA program I'm involved with via Lockheed Martin.

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Giving Deception talk on Thursday at IEEE CS DVP EXA (24 hour event for CS Distinguished Visitor lectures)
https://t.co/AuXVwpEcZJ

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Virtual talk I'm giving on Friday....

Distinguished Lecture (Virtual) - Civilized Collaboration: Ethical architectures for enforcing legal requirements and mediating social norms in Human-robot Interaction https://t.co/iTKB0DHdf8

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Upcoming IEEE CS Distinguished Lecture next month. Looking forward to it!
https://t.co/vEKDZusV5h

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

In Fiji with family

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Heading to AI4 in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks for a panel on "The Race to AGI". Should be interesting. Been a while since I've been back to Vegas.
https://t.co/F3KLbetkZR

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Looking forward to my virtual talk on Monday to SE Michigan IEEE chapter!

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Heading to Paris next week to talk about Battlefield robotics at HiParis! conference. Plus my wife and I will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary there, (and then again in Coronado, a couple of weeks later with friends and family.)

https://t.co/v4slDJKabE

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

HotTopic Panel on Autonomous Weapons, April 25, 2024 https://t.co/WnEDymTPC9 via @YouTube

FYI: Here's the video of today's ACM hot topics panel.

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Heading out tomorrow to DC area for a 2-day workshop titled “Testing and Evaluation of Ethical AI,” jointly coordinated by AFOSR and DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office. Looking forward to it!

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

at the meeting

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Upcoming ACM webinar panel on 4/25 I'll be engaged in:
https://t.co/7P4YjiEL02

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Heading out to UPenn Law in a few days for. Ethical and Legal Dilemmas of Autonomous Weapons in War and National Security - CERL https://t.co/hVcyEOdcyO

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Podcast now with video
https://t.co/ngMGGXRPUS

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

New article for Late Breaking reports for HRI 2024:
https://t.co/lLW5de0ws0 (click on pdf)

[Sanjay Puri @spuri]

Dive into the heart of AI ethics with @RonaldArkin of @GeorgiaTech on Regulating AI: Innovate Responsibly as we explore robot intimacy and its societal impact. How do we align AI with humanity?

Click for the full episode.

#AIRegulation #AISafety #AIStandard

[Ronald Craig Arkin @RonaldArkin]

Coming talk at Sonoma State! Looking forward to it!

[Andrew Critch (🤖🩺🚀) @AndrewCritchPhD]

Reminder: "Mitigating the risk of (human) extinction from artificial intelligence should be a global priority", according to…

The CEOs of the world’s three leading frontier AI labs:
• Demis Hassabis — CEO, Google DeepMind
• Dario Amodei — CEO, Anthropic
• Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI

For their signatures, see here:
https://t.co/a6f9aJ2xch

Also, mere common sense will tell you that creating beings who are much faster and more intelligent than humans could pose a threat to our existence. For instance, they could compete with us for resources, pollute the environment in ways that harm humans but not machines, or (help) engineer human-specific weapons like viruses. You don't need to appeal to authority, corporations, or academics for this concern to make sense. Experts are only needed to assess how soon are these risks, how severe they are, and how to mitigate them.

Speaking of experts, the three most cited AI researchers in history have now also said mitigating AI-driven extinction risk should be a global priority:
• Geoffrey Hinton — Turing Laureate & Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto
• Yoshua Bengio — Turing Laureate & Professor of Computer Science, U. Montreal / Mila
• Ilya Sutskever — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, OpenAI

See the statement linked above for their signatures. To verify their world-leading citation counts, just search Google Scholar for {label:artificial_intelligence+OR+label:AI}:
https://t.co/6W6x3bqiQi

Professor Hinton has now given numerous interviews on extinction risk from AI; see:
https://t.co/S2jS9HdfkC

Professor Bengio has written about how AI can "go rogue", here:
https://t.co/nnysoVMs6Q
... which is just one pathway for AI yielding extinction risk if not handled carefully.

Hundreds of other leading scientists, academics, and AI professionals have also signed the above statement on extinction risk. I've listed 100 of them below. With so many leaders discussing this issue, one can hope it will be resolved and everything will be okay 🙂 I certainly hope for that myself.

*** However… ***

... a small number of scientists, such as Yann LeCun from Facebook's Meta Corporation, engage in name-calling of other experts for discussing this issue, making it difficult to have clear intellectual conversations about it. LeCun uses the words "doomers" and "useful idiots" and "ridiculous" for people who raise concerns about AI. You can see this behavior on Twitter:
https://t.co/s17fFThKTJ

LeCun has also communicated this way in in-person conversations and interviews as well.

Another "doomer" name-calling expert, Jurgen Schmidhuber, argues that humans are merely a "stepping stone" to be replaced by greater technological beings:
https://t.co/hYRgsCJCeX

If expert bullying and name-calling prevent these issues from being approached in a clear-headed, scientifically-grounded fashion, hope begins to dwindle. The comforting assumption that "the experts will take care of it" goes away if the experts are too busy insulting each other.

*** What can you do? ***

Everyone can play a part in maintaining civil standards of discourse about extinction risk, and remember that it's not a fringe or ridiculous topic to discuss. Evidence, common sense reasoning about that evidence, and civility are all crucial for handling risk without abandoning AI progress in life-saving areas like healthcare.

This *includes* not name-calling or bullying LeCun and others for arguing these concerns are overblown and antithetical to freedom and progress. Their ideas need to be heard, too.

With that said, below are 100 more AI scientists, industry leaders, and academics who say mitigating AI extinction risk should be a global priority:

*** ***

• Emad Mostaque CEO, Stability AI

• Dawn Song — Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

• Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

• Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Inflection AI

• Shane Legg — Chief AGI Scientist and Co-Founder, Google DeepMind

• Ya-Qin Zhang — Professor and Dean, AIR, Tsinghua University

• Igor Babuschkin — Co-Founder, xAI

• James Manyika — SVP, Research, Technology and Society, Google-Alphabet

• Yi Zeng — Professor and Director of Brain-inspired Cognitive AI Lab, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Xianyuan Zhan — Assistant Professor, Tsinghua University

• Albert Efimov — Chief of Research, Russian Association of Artificial Intelligence

• Jianyi Zhang — Professor, Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute

• Anca Dragan — Associate Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

• David Silver — Professor of Computer Science, Google DeepMind and UCL

• Tony (Yuhuai) Wu — Co-Founder, xAI

• Andrew Barto — Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts

• Jaime Fernández Fisac — Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University

• Diyi Yang — Assistant Professor, Stanford University

• Pattie Maes — Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Media Lab

• Eric Horvitz — Chief Scientific Officer, Microsoft

• Peter Norvig — Education Fellow, Stanford University

• Atoosa Kasirzadeh — Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh, Alan Turing Institute

• Ian Goodfellow — Principal Scientist, Google DeepMind

• John Schulman — Co-Founder, OpenAI

• Wojciech Zaremba — Co-Founder, OpenAI

• Sheila McIlraith — Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

• Victoria Krakovna — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Mary Phuong — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Lex Fridman — Research Scientist, MIT

• Sharon Li — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin Madison

• Phillip Isola — Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

• David Krueger — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Cambridge

• Vincent Conitzer — Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Oxford

• Bart Selman — Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University

• Philip Torr — Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

• Michael Wellman — Professor & Chair of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

• Scott Aaronson — Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin

• Max Tegmark — Professor, MIT, Center for AI and Fundamental Interactions

• Victor Veitch — Assistant Professor of Data Science and Statistics, University of Chicago

• Dylan Hadfield-Menell — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, MIT

• Samuel R. Bowman — Associate Professor of Computer Science, NYU and Anthropic

• Mengye Ren — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, New York University

• Shiri Dori-Hacohen — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Connecticut

• Jared Kaplan — Co-Founder, Anthropic

• Chris Olah — Co-Founder, Anthropic

• Hongyi Zhang — Research Scientist, ByteDance

• Daniel M. Roy — Associate Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, University of Toronto; Vector Institute

• Jakob Foerster — Associate Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

• Roger Grosse — Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto and Anthropic

• David Duvenaud — Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

• Michael Osborne — Professor of Machine Learning, University of Oxford

• Nancy Chang — Research Scientist, Google

• Tom Schaul — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Kanjun Qiu — CEO, Generally Intelligent

• Tegan Maharaj — Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

• Florian Shkurti — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

• Jeff Clune — Associate Professor of Computer Science and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, The University of British Columbia and the Vector Institute

• Felix Juefei Xu — Research Scientist, Meta AI

• Jean-Claude Latombe — Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science, Stanford University

• Scott Niekum — Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Lionel Levine — Associate Professor of Mathematics, Cornell University

• Thryn Shapira — AI Ethics Lead, Google Photos

• Cihang Xie — Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, UC Santa Cruz

• Philip S. Thomas — Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts

• Brian Ziebart — Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago

• Timothy Lillicrap — Research Director, Google DeepMind

• Samuel Albanie — Assistant Professor of Engineering, University of Cambridge

• Jascha Sohl-Dickstein — Principal Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Ronald Craig Arkin — Regents' Professor Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Been Kim — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Nando de Freitas — Director, Science Board, Google DeepMind

�� He He — Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, New York University

• David McAllester — Professor of Computer Science, TTIC

• Jinwoo Shin — KAIST Endowed Chair Professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

• Dae-Shik Kim — Professor of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

• Edith Elkind — Professor of Computing Science, University of Oxford

• Frank Hutter — Professor of Machine Learning, Head of ELLIS Unit, University of Freiburg

• Noah Fiedel — Director, Research and Engineering, Google DeepMind

• Rif A. Saurous — Research Director, Google

• Jose Hernandez-Orallo — Professor of Computer Science, Technical University of Valencia

• Paul S. Rosenbloom — Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of Southern California

• Chris J. Maddison — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

• Prasad Tadepalli — Professor of Computer Science, Oregon State University

• Alexey Dosovitskiy — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

��� Clare Lyle — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Nisarg Shah — Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

• Ryota Kanai — CEO, Araya, Inc.

• Tim G. J. Rudner — Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow, New York University

• Elad Hazan — Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University and Google DeepMind

• Shai Shalev-Shwartz — Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Katherine Lee — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Vijay Bolina — Chief Information Security Officer, Google DeepMind

• Charles Cole — Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Systems Biology, Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College

• Noam Brown — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Paul B Rainey — Professor, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology

• Jose del R. Millan — Chair Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Neurology, Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

• Simon Kornblith — Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Mark Cohen — Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology, Biomedical Physics, and Bioengineering, UCLA

• Michiel Bakker — Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

• Nathaniel Osgood — Professor, Director Computational Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan

The names above are all drawn from the Statement on AI Risk from the Center for AI Safety, lead by:

• Dan Hendrycks — Executive Director, Center for AI Safety
https://t.co/a6f9aJ2xch

***

Remember, the intimidating list of signatures above should not be used to bully or silence voices who disagree with them, nor should the signatories themselves be ridiculed or dismissed as "doomers", "useful idiots", or other insults just for raising extinction risk as a concern. Without quality discourse, the comforting hope that "the experts will handle it" begins to fade.