The Orwellian Ministry of Love would indisputably say “no”, of course. The geniuses of our time would not seem to agree apparently. Almost a decade ago theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, probably the closest a generation ever had to an Albert Einstein forewarned that the development of A.I. could spell the end of the human race.

“It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate…it’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever“, the Professor said. More recently Elon Musk’s publicly expressed fear that A.I. is more dangerous than nuclear weapons seems to be given weight when ChaosGPT, a modified version of OpenAI’s open source auto-GPT A.I. chatbot identified nuclear armageddon as the most efficient way to bring an end to humanity. Bill Gates cautioned on the risks of A.I., and tens of thousands including include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed a petition to stop the development of A.I.

Imposing a moratorium or ban on the development of A.I. would however only curtail your mainstream A.I. developers and the (relatively) good players of the technology world. A legislated moratorium or legally imposed ban on the development of A.I. does nothing to stop the bad actors from continuing to develop and innovate A.I. for their own agendas. The worst thing that can happen is not when A.I. goes wrong or is abused, but that you do not have the technology to counter it. An A.I. that creates malicious code to hack or virus to infect can be counteracted by even smarter A.I. to identify, prevent, shield or otherwise extinguish against such risks. You can have A.I. to reveal generated content containing false, copied, or toxic information. But you have a serious problem if your technology is not as advanced as those of the bad actors. From a certain perspective, imposing a pause on the development of A.I. might not only be irresponsible, but dangerous.