Linkedin founder slams efforts to rein in AI as ‘anti-humanist’

The founder of Linkedin has said a six month pause on artificial intelligence (AI) would be “anti-humanist”.

Reid Hoffman said “issuing a blanket six month pause is an anti-humanist manoeuvre”, on Wednesday at London’s CogX, which calls itself a ‘festival of AI and transformational tech’.

His comments follow calls for a six month pause in AI development in an open letter to the AI community signed by over 1,000 tech experts, including Elon Musk, back in March.

The main concern raised was that new powerful AI systems may, without proper planning and management, pose a great risk to society and humanity.

“So the ones who sit down and agree that six month pause are the ones who care about humanity? The ones who don’t are the ones who don’t?” Hoffman said.

The open letter argued that a pause would allow AI labs and independent experts to “jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development.”

But Hoffman suggested that a pause on AI developments would be a “mistake” because bad actors would ignore it and continue progressing, while good actors would be left in the dust.

“You want the humanist efforts that are concerned with you know, kind of call it equal participation,” said Hoffman, who founded Linkedin in 2002.