Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender

The risks of AI aren't what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals

Amid a barrage of news stories warning about superintelligent machines rendering humanity extinct, a CNN story describing the opposite scenario - one in which the US military's reliance on brittle chatbots almost brought the US into war with China - went mostly unnoticed by the public.

The biggest international AI news of the past three weeks was Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon's resignation. According to him, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives". Coxon's description of a terminator" scenario, a machine becoming much smarter than humanity and deciding to wipe us out, captured the public, journalists' and politicians' attention, stirring waves of fear-inducing, credulous reporting, and policy actions.

Timnit Gebru is executive director of Dair and author of the forthcoming book Deep Unlearning: The Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, which is available for preorders now and set to publish on 16 February.

Emily M Bender is professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of The AI Con.