By Futurist Thomas Frey
A troubling question keeps surfacing in late-night discussions among AI researchers: what happens when truly powerful AI becomes accessible to truly dangerous people?
We’ve spent decades democratizing technology, celebrating the principle that powerful tools should be available to everyone. The internet, smartphones, and cloud computing followed this path—initially expensive and exclusive, eventually cheap and universal. We assumed this was progress, that access equals empowerment equals good.
But AI is different. A malicious actor with sufficiently advanced AI could engineer bioweapons, create undetectable deepfakes to destabilize governments, automate fraud at unprecedented scale, or develop cyber weapons that make current ransomware look primitive. The same tool that helps a researcher cure disease could help a terrorist design a pandemic.
Continue reading… “The AI License Debate: Should We Restrict Who Gets Access to Powerful AI?”