Policy
Royal Society mathematicians ask the society to speak up on AI existential risk
An open letter signed by 42 mathematician fellows of the Royal Society asks its president, Paul Nurse, to press the government and the press to treat the possibility that advanced AI poses an existential threat as a serious question rather than industry marketing.
The letter was circulated on September 16 in a guest post on Terence Tao's mathematics blog, written by Ben Green. Tao said he backs the argument but did not sign it because of his own collaborations with AI companies. Signatories include the Fields medalists Wendelin Werner, Peter Scholze and Martin Hairer, and the group states that none of them are affiliated with AI developers.
The mathematicians argue that leading systems have advanced quickly enough on open research problems that comparable progress in other domains should not be assumed to be distant, and that risk estimates published by the laboratories themselves deserve to be weighed rather than waved away. The Decoder, reporting on the letter, said the signatories describe current models as performing at the level of strong human mathematicians in parts of the field. The Royal Society has not announced a response.
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