Berkeley Talks

In the early 20th century, factory workers — later known as the “Radium Girls” — were hired to paint watch and instrument dials with radium‑based luminous paint. They were instructed to keep their brushes sharp by shaping them with their lips. In the following years, many of these workers developed devastating illnesses, including severe bone and jaw damage, anemia and cancer, that were ultimately traced to chronic radium exposure.For Holly Elmore, an evolutionary biologist and executive director of PauseAI US — an organization that seeks a global pause to advanced AI development — this tragedy is a stark warning for our current era. In a talk she gave Dec. 9 for the Berkeley AI Risk Speaker Series, Elmore argues that we’re repeating this mistake with artificial intelligence by assuming we can safely play with a technology we don't fully understand. “The expectation of many people in AI safety, for many years, has been that when we got to this point, the AI, once it was aligned, would figure out the answ