A government advisor on artificial intelligence (AI) has not ruled out the possibility of bans, following increasing concern over the safety of the rapidly developing technology.
Marc Warner, boss of tech firm Faculty AI and a member of the government’s AI council, said “sensible decisions” on artificial-general-intelligence (AGI) were needed in the coming year.
“There is a strong argument that at some point, we may decide that enough is enough and we're just going to ban algorithms above a certain complexity or a certain amount of compute,” he told the BBC.
Unlike narrow AI, which is used for specific tasks such as translating text, AGI is “aimed at being as smart or smarter than a human across a very broad domain of tasks,” Warner explained.
Narrow AI will likely be regulated similarly to existing technology, Warner continued, but AGI may require entirely new rules or even a ban.
"At the very least, there needs to be sort of strong limits on the amount of compute that can be arbitrarily thrown at these things,” he added.
Warner’s comments follow comments from European and American officials over the need for regulation on AI, after several experts warned of the dangers of the emerging science.