One expert's view of AI, we need to contain it, but also, good luck with that.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Lillie Dremalli.

When Mustafa Salaman co-founded the AI research company DeepMind more than a decade ago,

his goal at the time felt ambitious, even a bit far-fetched, to build a machine that

could replicate human intelligence.

Now he says rapid progress in the development of AI means that goal could be met within

the next three years, and the implications of that milestone are huge.

Salaman explores them in his new book The Coming Wave, which is out this week.

In it, he makes the case for what he calls containment.

The idea of containment is that we should always have the ability to slow down or potentially

even completely stop any technology at any period in its development or its deployment.

It seems like a simple and reasonable idea, like who would not want our species to always

have control and oversight over the things that we invent, but it is, I think, the big

challenge of the next few decades, precisely because of the pace of change with AI and

synthetic biology and how quickly things are improving.

And in the book, it feels at times like you're arguing for containment while also making

the case that, to some extent, anyway, containment is impossible.

Is that a fair assessment of the argument you're laying out?

Yes, exactly.

I think that when you look at the history of all technologies, things get cheaper and

easier to use and they spread far and wide and everything from the handaxe to the discovery

of fire to the invention of steam and electricity has got cheaper and easier to use and everybody

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