Scientists Were Asked About Top AI-Related Risks. One In Five Think It Could Develop Dangerous Capabilities

Respondents of a new study estimated that there is a 20 percent chance in the next five years that AI could do something "catastrophic" that harms humanity or results in a million deaths.

Axios reported that MIT and the University of Queensland in Australia surveyed 272 experts on a variety of topics to gauge what the potential risk of AI was in the next five years. The study focused on 24 different risks.

"There are many AI risks," said Peter Slattery, a research scientist with MIT FutureTech and one of the study's co-authors. "One of the key things behind this work is trying to figure out who needs to do what differently, and in what sort of coordination."

Part of the goal of the study was to identify the most likely areas of risks to hopefully prompt strategies to mitigate the danger. The study found that of the 24 risk areas, the experts felt that 18 had at least a 10 percent chance of happening in the next five years and causing catastrophic harm.

The study defined catastrophic harm as having the "potential for more than 1 million deaths, more than $100 billion in financial losses, or comparable civilizational-scale intangible damages."

The top five concerns were:

• AI possessing dangerous capabilities (21.5 percent)
• Cyberattacks, weapon development or use, and mass harm (21 percent)
• Power centralization and unfair distribution of benefits (18 percent)
• Competitive dynamics (16.6 percent)
• False or misleading information (12.8 percent

"AI is uniquely well equipped to attack those aspects of society and cause harm," Slattery said. "Coding and hacking are some of the areas where we're seeing the fastest growth in AI capability."

Even with mitigation measures, the experts believed that five threat areas still would have a least a 10 percent chance of causing catastrophic harm to humanity sometime in the next five years:

• AI systems possessing dangerous capabilities (12 percent)
• AI-enabled weapons, cyberattacks, or other mass-harm capabilities (12 percent)
• Environmental harm (12 percent)
• Inequality and unemployment (11 percent)
• Power centralization and unfair distribution of AI's benefits (11 percent)

The report also singled out specific sectors that the experts consider to be particularly vulnerable to attacks or disruption by AI: information sector, national security, and finance.

The information sector could face disruption through data insecurity, disinformation, and manipulation. For national security, some of the concerns were surveillance, weapons development, and the use of AI by hostile actors to launch attacks. With finance, the worry revolved around the potential for fraud, market manipulation, privacy breaches and other potential system failures.

"We're not saying these things are definitely going to happen," Slattery said. "We're saying these are the things that experts think are worth paying attention to now."