Demis Hassabis, CEO of Deepmind and a winner of the Nobel Prize, says that the most serious threat posed by artificial intelligence is not a generalized loss of jobs, but the potential of technology unhappy by bad actors.
Speaking at the SXSW Festival in London, Hassabis highlighted the need for stricter restrictions on access to powerful AI systems, warning that the world moves too slowly to regulate the tools capable of destabilizing economies and entire companies.
“These two risks are significant,” Hassabis told Anna Stewart from CNN during the interview. “But a bad actor could reuse these same technologies for a harmful end … And therefore a great thing is how to restrict access to these powerful systems to bad actors, but allow the good actors to do a lot of incredible things with?”
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His comments are involved in increasing anxiety concerning the disruption of AI on the job market. Last week, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all the work of entry -level collar. The meta-PDG, Mark Zuckerberg, recently said that AI would write half of the code of his business by 2026.
But Hassabis, who heads the flagship laboratory of research on Google AI, minimized the fears of a “jobpocalypse”. He recognized that AI will change the nature of the work and pushes society to adapt, but said that the real challenge lies in the way governments, institutions and businesses distribute the productivity gains that AI will generate.
“There will be a huge change,” he said. “Usually what’s going on is new, even better jobs can replace some of the jobs that are replaced. We will see if this happens this time. ”
But he said that the biggest danger is to let these systems develop and proliferate without adequate guarantees. Citing recent examples – such as hackers who make the identity of American officials using vocal messages generated by AI, or the increase in Fake’s deep pornography – Hassabis has said that the absence of a global IA security framework is more and more alarming.
A report by the State Department in 2023 warned that AI could present “catastrophic” risks for national security, while the FBI recently published an opinion after having detected its audio generated by AI-A used to usurp the identity of US officials.
The concerns are not hypothetical. Last month, President Donald Trump signed the Take IT Down Act, which aims to limit the spread of non -consensual explicit Deepfakes by making it illegal to share such content online. At the same time, Google discreetly removed the language of its AI ethics page in February, including a clause committing not to use AI for weapons and surveillance – by making more concerns about the erosion of internal railing.
A Call for International Governance of AI
To avoid improper use, Hassabis calls for an international agreement on how AI must be used and governed – a kind of global agreement similar to nuclear or climatic pacts. But geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China, have so far blocked progress on any unified regulatory vision.
“Obviously, it seems difficult at present with geopolitics as it is,” admitted Hassabis. “But … as AI becomes more sophisticated, I think it will become clearer for the world that it must happen.”
Head Deepmind is considering a future in which people will count strongly on AI “agents” – autonomous tools capable of performing complex tasks in real time. Google is already working to integrate these capacities into its search engine and has experienced intelligent glasses powered by AI that work as digital assistants always on.
“We sometimes call it a universal AI assistant who will go with you everywhere,” said Hassabis. “Help in your daily life, do banal administration tasks for you, but also enrich your life by recommending incredible things … maybe even friends to meet.”
Between the media and the reality
Despite the powerful promise of AI and its rapid adoption between sectors, Hassabis noted that technology is still suffering from serious limitations, especially bias and hallucination. These faults have led to failure of the real world, as when the Sun-Totes Chicago and the Philadelphia Inquirer published summer reading lists generated by the AI which included books that did not exist.
While technologists like Hassabis remain optimistic that AI will be a clear advantage for the company, its comments underline the growing split between the leaders of the industry: some warn against ECA economic shock, others of its geopolitical risks. Hassabis seems to believe that the two are real, but only one could become uncontrollable if it is not controlled.
