Why would the CEO of a company publicly warn that the very products developed by his own company are so dangerous that they could, in the future, threaten humanity as a whole?
The first answer is naturally the simplest: because he genuinely believes that the danger exists. It may reflect a dramatic realisation of the potential consequences of a technology developing at unprecedented speed. This is, after all, the stated reason, and I do not have sufficiently detailed knowledge of either the specific circumstances or the corporate context to challenge it.
But, with all due caution, there may be another way of looking at it.
Calls for particularly stringent regulation of artificial intelligence — a process already well under way in Europe — may create a formidable regulatory barrier to entry. Compliance costs, control systems, audit requirements, liability regimes and increasingly complex organisational requirements are inevitably easier to bear for established players that already have access to substantial capital, infrastructure and global scale.
But I would like to take the argument one step further.
What if, at least in Europe, we regarded artificial intelligence in the same way that coal and steel were regarded by Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi at the birth of the European Coal and Steel Community?
Coal and steel were then strategic resources, both industrial and military, which had stood at the heart of decades of European conflict. The answer was not simply to regulate them, but to remove them, at least in part, from purely national competition by creating a common interest and a shared system.
Why not imagine something similar for artificial intelligence?
A common European pool of research, computing infrastructure, data, energy and expertise, jointly funded and governed, whose benefits could be shared among Member States and European industry.
There is, of course, a particularly delicate issue that cannot be ignored: artificial intelligence, just like coal and steel — and, subsequently, nuclear energy — is also a dual-use technology, with clear military applications.
But perhaps this strengthens, rather than weakens, the historical parallel.
Europe was built by pooling what had once divided it. Perhaps it is time to ask whether artificial intelligence is one of the technologies for which Europe should do exactly the same again.