36% of Scientists Surveyed Fear AI Could Lead to ‘Nuclear-Level Catastrophe’

By Kenny Stancil 

While nearly three-quarters of researchers believe artificial intelligence (AI) “could soon lead to revolutionary social change,” 36% worry that AI decisions “could cause nuclear-level catastrophe.”

Those survey findings are included in the 2023 AI Index Report, an annual assessment of the fast-growing industry assembled by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and published earlier this month.

“These systems demonstrate capabilities in question answering, and the generation of text, image, and code unimagined a decade ago, and they outperform the state of the art on many benchmarks, old and new,” says the report.