Life moves pretty fast, but AI moves even faster. Just two years ago, people were still poking fun at AI models for failing to count the number of r’s in the word strawberry. Now, we’re wondering if it will kill us all.

The debate about the dangers of AI, which had been gently simmering for a while, recently started to bubble over. There is now a chorus of voices from the field giving their predictions of an imminent AI disaster.

Last month, Evan Hubinger, a senior safety researcher at AI firm Anthropic, said he thinks there’s a greater than 10% chance that AI will wipe out humanity within the next decade. The former chief scientist at the UK’s AI Security Institute, Geoffrey Irving, puts it at 50%. Daniel Kokotajlo of the AI Futures Project thinks the likelihood of some kind of catastrophe is as high as 70%. That is quite the odds board – place your bets, please.

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has since called for a slowdown in AI development, with stricter regulations to prevent the technology spiralling out of control. Many other leaders in the field agree with him, including Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Despite this emerging consensus within the field, there are still no global standards in place. As the president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, recently pointed out, AI is subject to fewer safety rules than milk production.

Lessons of history

Regulating such a rapidly changing technology is not easy, though, and could hamper innovation. The AI boom is already revolutionising our lives and could bring enormous advances to cancer patients, from early detection to drug discovery. Are we at risk of losing those benefits in a tangle of red tape?

There is another industry that offers some useful lessons for policymakers. Like AI, this industry pushes the boundaries of science and technology, with the potential to both improve lives and cause serious harm. Like AI, it is driven by enormous commercial incentives and dominated by a handful of companies. Like AI, it relies on public trust.

It is, of course, the pharmaceutical industry. Where the sectors differ is that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most heavily regulated across the globe.

That wasn’t always the case, though. Up until the 1960s, the UK had no comprehensive drug regulation system to monitor the safety of medicines before they reached patients. The thalidomide disaster, which caused birth defects in over 10,000 children, changed that. In response to the tragedy, the government enacted the Medicines Act 1968, introducing stricter testing for medicines before licensing.