Welcome to the Future of Life Institute newsletter. Every month, we bring 43,000+ subscribers the latest news on how emerging technologies are transforming our world.

If you've found this newsletter helpful, why not tell your friends, family, and colleagues to subscribe?

Today's newsletter is a nine-minute read. Some of what we cover this month:

• ⚖️ Critical AI legislation in California

• 🎨 $50K “Superintelligence Imagined” creative contest

• 🛣️ Our response to the Senate AI Roadmap

• 🗣️ UN Secretary-General and the Pope call for governance of AI

With Congress stalled on ensuring the safety of AI systems, California legislators are increasingly demonstrating leadership on the pressing task of establishing accountability for AI harms. State Senator Scott Wiener has introduced one of the key proposed bills: SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.

Having recently passed out of the California Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection and now the Assembly Judiciary Committee, Sen. Wiener’s bill is one of the leading proposals for legislation. It’s also garnered widespread public support, with a recent poll finding that 77% of Californians support the bill’s call for mandatory AI safety testing, and 86% wanting the state to prioritize developing AI safety regulations in general.

The bill would require AI companies to undertake safety testing for their largest models, in order to mitigate catastrophic risks they may present. Under the proposal, if AI products are deployed without actually meeting safety requirements, AI companies could be held liable for resulting harm.

The bill would also create a public compute resource, CalCompute, to help balance out Big Tech’s domination of the space, and allow startups, researchers, and community groups to participate more in the AI industry.

With tech companies such as OpenAI and Meta investing incredible resources into creating artificial general intelligence that outperforms humans across most domains, it’s important for the public to understand what this could mean for them. To support this education, we’ve launched an exciting new creative contest. With our “Superintelligence Imagined” contest, we’re offering five $10,000 prizes for the best creative materials that help us address this question: “What is superintelligence, and how might it threaten humanity?”. 

Any textual/visual/auditory/spatial format is welcome. We’re looking for bold, ambitious, scientifically accurate, and informative tools, with potential to reach a large audience.

Learn more about the contest and resources available to help (including a community to find teammates, if you wish to join a team) here. Entries are due August 31, with winners announced in October.

Our policy team have released their recommendations for legislative action in response to the U.S. Bipartisan Senate AI Working Group’s Roadmap on AI. 

Covering nine domains of AI risks/harms and related topics, from AGI to deepfakes, this document provides tangible pathways to turn the vision outlined in the Roadmap into meaningful action. 

Read the full recommendations here; you can also scroll through its highlights below:

World leaders continue to voice their fears about ungoverned AI development and deployment.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has shared several statements about the risks of ungoverned AI within the past few weeks, calling for “inclusive global governance tools” to stop us from “sleepwalk[ing] into a dystopian future.”

Addressing the G7 summit for the first time ever, Pope Francis - who has recently called out the challenges to humanity presented by AI with increasing frequency - urged world leaders to ensure AI stays “human-centric” and under human control. He also explicitly called for a ban on autonomous weapons systems, stating that “no machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”