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The risk of serious contact burns is increasing as temperatures soar and as more people move to the desert Southwest (as from sidewalk burns).

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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists  on  three understandable, but mistaken,  beliefs about A.I.:

1.  Other issues are more important?  Any credible existential threat is one too many and all must be engaged in parallel. If you accept that AI might pose an existential threat, then it should be a societal priority to address this threat, even if you are more concerned about another issue.

2. The chance of humanity being made extinct by A.I. is only 5%?   A five percent  chance of causing human extinction is unacceptably high. (How would you feel about boarding a plane with a                5% chance of surviving?)

3.  AI is not yet an extinction risk?   NOT YET: As Stephen Hawking put it, ignoring the possibility that AI could be catastrophic for humanity “would be a mistake, and potentially our  worst mistake ever.” (VOX, 2018)

The author of the Bulletin article is  Jack Kelly who writes:

In 2022 a “survey of thousands of AI researchers found that the median guess for the date when AI would be at least 50 percent likely to overtake human intelligence in all possible tasks was 2060. A year later, that timeline had dropped to 2047. There is now broad expert consensus that human-level artificial intelligence is probable within the lifetimes of most people alive today. Expert predictions should be used to alert us to potential future threats—just as the climate movement has rallied in response to warnings from scientists about carbon dioxide emissions. The world’s collective failure to heed climate warnings offers a painful lesson that should not be repeated. Regardless of the exact timeline, the hard problem of how to properly regulate and control this extremely powerful technology (both technically and politically) is one that must be tackled now, rather than waiting until we are faced with a crisis.”

“Treating AI regulation as a tradeoff in which government can either regulate existing misuse cases such as deepfakes or regulate development of potentially dangerous future models ignores the fact that it is critical to do both. The October 2023 White House AI regulation executive order does exactly that: It addresses existing harms like bias and discrimination, data privacy, and worker’s rights—and also institutes forward-looking principles to reduce existential risk by testing and evaluating models for dangerous capabilities. This is a clear example of how near-term and longer-term concerns can be addressed together.”