Arm CEO says his fear that humans could lose control over AI keeps him up at night

What just happened? Plenty of people worry about the dangers of AI advancing to the point where humans lose control of these systems, leading to consequences ranging from quite bad to apocalyptic. But the warnings hit even harder when they come from those within the tech industry, including the CEO of Arm, who says the idea of this scenario keeps him awake at night.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Arm boss Rene Haas said that artificial intelligence needs some form of override or backdoor that can shut the systems down. “The thing I worry about most is humans losing capability,” said the chip designer’s boss, after being asked what keeps him up at night when he thinks about artificial intelligence.

Haas estimates that 70% of the world’s population touches Arm-designed products in some way – 99% of the 1.4 billion smartphones sold every year use either Arm designs or its tech. Of course, he’s not against AI and is aware of the role Arm will play in the new technological revolution. The CEO previously said, “You can’t really run AI without Arm.” Haas just feels that a failsafe is required.

“I think it [AI] will find its way into everything that we do, and every aspect of how we work, live, play,” said Haas, who became CEO last year. “It’s going to change everything over the next five-to-10 years.”

Haas isn’t the first person in the industry to admit to concerns over AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned in February that the world might not be far from a “potentially scary” artificial intelligence. There was also a warning from the ChatGPT company in July about the potential of an AI smarter than people being developed that could cause the extinction of the human race.

Then there’s xAI boss Elon Musk, who has constantly talked about the technology being an existential threat to humanity, while artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton left Google in May due to the risks associated with emerging AI. Many experts and CEOs even compared the dangers posed by AI to those of nuclear war and pandemics. Two-thirds of the American public are just as worried, too.

Not everyone has the same concerns, though. Prof Yann LeCun, another one of the Godfathers of AI, called warnings about the AI threat to humanity “ridiculous.” And famed professor of theoretical physics, Michio Kaku, compared generative AI to glorified tape recorders.