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

Former deputy PM now involved in tech industry says many within sector are ‘winding themselves up into a lather’

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 and bioweapons 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 the AI startup AMI Labs, said he spent “a huge amount of time” with people in the tech industry.