  Recent dramatic advances in artificial intelligence indicate that in the
coming years, humanity may irreversibly cross a threshold by creating
superhuman general-purpose AI: AI that is better than humans at cognitive tasks
in general in the way that AI is currently unbeatable in certain domains. This
would upend core aspects of human society, present many unprecedented risks,
and is likely to be uncontrollable in several senses. We can choose to not do
so, starting by instituting hard limits - placed at the national and
international level, and verified by hardware security measures - on the
computation that can be used to train and run neural networks. With these
limits in place, AI research and industry can focus on making both narrow and
general-purpose AI that humans can understand and control, and from which we
can reap enormous benefit.
