Paris: Healthcare professionals should warn the world about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), a group of academics wrote on Wednesday, as clamor grows for a halt to work on the technology.
The scholars wrote in the BMJ Global Health Journal that time was running out to take action because corporations, militaries and governments were working so fast to develop AI tools.
AI exploded in the public awareness last year with ChatGPTa bot capable of generating coherent text snippets from short prompts.
The huge popularity of the bot sparked a race between tech giants like Google and Microsoft to embed AI into everything from spreadsheets to search tools, and encouraged investors to pour money into AI startups.
But health academics pointed to a variety of threats, including powerful AI surveillance systems being developed in dozens of countries, killer robots and disinformation.
For healthcare, they wrote, people with darker skin were at serious risk of harm or reduced care because the data sets used to “train” the AI algorithms were often skewed.
They argued that “the window of opportunity to avoid serious and potentially existential harm is closing.”
The authors, led by Frederik Federspiel of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and David McCoy of the United Nations University in Kuala Lumpur, wrote that global cooperation would be needed.
“Healthcare professionals have a key role in raising awareness and sounding the alarm about the risks and threats posed by AI,” they wrote in a review article.
“If AI ever delivers on its promise to benefit humanity and society, we must protect democracy, strengthen our public interest institutions, and dilute power so there are effective checks and balances.”
Concern about the direction of AI research is raising alarm even among those in the center of the field.
Earlier this month, computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, often dubbed “the godfather of AI,” resigned from his job at Google to warn of the “profound risks to society and humanity” from technology.
In March, Billionaire Elon Musk – whose automaker Tesla implements AI systems – and hundreds of experts have called for a pause on AI development to allow time to make sure the technology is safe and properly regulated.
