Nick Clegg plays down fears ‘godlike’ AI could exterminate humanity

Nick Clegg has dismissed fears over AI’s “godlike power to exterminate humanity”, calling it a sign that tech bosses are “breathing their own fumes”.

The former UK deputy prime minister said that tech bosses should focus on addressing known “specific threats” such as cybersecurity, bio-weapons and emotional dependence rather than the “slightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “I think it is perhaps accidentally self-serving, because it sort of implies that we can only be made safe by having everything controlled, in effect, by an oligopoly of a small number of companies, and I think it slightly paralyses the political debate.”

Clegg, who was formerly the president of global affairs at Meta and owns more than 917,000 shares in Nscale, a UK-based datacentre, and is a cofounder of AI startup AMI Labs, said he spent “a huge amount of time” with people in the tech industry.

“They don’t agree amongst themselves at all. Of course, we hear the most apocalyptic voices,” he said, noting that one person who runs an AI lab said the current discourse was “totally silly”.

“There is a culture in Silicon Valley – it’s an odd place for those who haven’t been there. It is in many ways the centre of the universe, or at least claiming to shape it. It’s also an oddly parochial place. It’s a strange sort of culture where the engineers can get quite close to the technology and start slightly breathing their own fumes as they wind themselves up into a lather about these things,” he added.

Asked about the autonomous hack conducted by a group of OpenAI agents on a major real-world company, Hugging Face, Clegg said there was a case for “tramlines and greater transparency”.

However, he said this would be unlikely to happen under a Trump administration given its competitiveness on AI. He also suspected China’s cooperation would be limited, since the development of AI technologies was viewed as a “national mission” after the country was “cheated out of the Industrial Revolution”.

He added: “I think there’s a great potential for the big three techno democracies in the world – India, Europe and the US – to collaborate more.”

Asked whether the British prime minister, Andy Burnham, could take a lead on such efforts, Clegg noted the UK was not a world leader on AI: “We need to be realistic about what influence we can and cannot exert.”

Clegg also disagreed with other proposed remedies, such as introducing a “kill switch”, which he said would be unworkable; or only producing closed models, where source code is not made public, which he said were no safer than open source models according to the evidence.

Instead, he suggested: “There is a lot that can be done both voluntarily and through regulation, to enforce far greater transparency on the way in which these models are concocted and how they operate.”