Scared about the threat of AI? It’s the big tech giants that need reining in | Devdatt Dubhashi and Shalom Lappin

Social media companies' algorithms enable the spread of extremism and social chaos. The case for regulating them is clear

In his 2021 Reith lectures, the third episode of which airs tonight, the artificial intelligence researcher Stuart Russell takes up the idea of a near-future AI that is so ruthlessly intelligent that it might pose an existential threat to humanity. A machine we create that might destroy us all.

This has long been a popular topic with researchers and the press. But we believe an existential threat from AI is both unlikely and in any case far off, given the current state of the technology. However, the recent development of powerful, but far smaller-scale, AI systems has had a significant effect on the world already, and the use of existing AI poses serious economic and social challenges. These are not distant, but immediate, and must be addressed.

Devdatt Dubhashi is professor of data science and AI at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Shalom Lappin is professor of natural language processing at Queen Mary University of London, director of the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability at the University of Gothenburg, and emeritus professor of computational linguistics at King's College London.