MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Category · 55.01.00
Risks from accelerating scientific progress
Description
"Scientific progress: AI could lead to very rapid scientific progress which would likely have long-term impacts, but it’s very unclear if these would be positive or negative. Much depends on the extent to which risky scientific domains are sped up relative to beneficial or risk-reducing ones, on who uses the technology enabled by this progress, and on how it is governed."
From A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
Other entries from Clarke2023
- Eased development of technologies that make a global catastrophe more likely
- Eased development of technologies that make a global catastrophe more likely
- Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development
- Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development
- Worsened conflict
- AI enables development of weapons of mass destruction
- AI enables automation of military decision-making
- AI-induced strategic instability
- Resource conflicts driven by AI development
- Increased power concentration and inequality
- Unequal distribution of harms and benefits
- AI-based automation increases income inequality