BEIJING — 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 celebration chief and President Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged “devoted efforts to safeguard political safety and enhance the safety governance of web knowledge and synthetic intelligence,” the official Xinhua Information Company mentioned.
Xi, who’s China’s head of state, commander of the army and chair of the celebration’s Nationwide Safety Fee, referred to as on the assembly for “staying keenly conscious of the difficult 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.
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China already dedicates huge assets to suppressing any perceived political threats to the celebration’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 not too long ago 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 celebration management, however like different nations, it’s scrambling to search out methods to manage the growing expertise.
Worries about synthetic intelligence programs outsmarting people and slipping uncontrolled have intensified with the rise of a brand new era of extremely succesful AI chatbots akin to ChatGPT.
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Scientists and tech business leaders, together with high-level executives at Microsoft and Google, issued a brand new warning Tuesday concerning 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 akin to pandemics and nuclear conflict,” the assertion mentioned.
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 mentioned AI poses “profound dangers to society and humanity,” and a few concerned within the subject have proposed a United Nations treaty to manage the expertise.
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