The meteoric rise of artificial intelligence has instilled an existential fear in “AI doomers,” a subset of people who believe the tech will cause humans to lose their jobs, fall prey to a dominating species of rogue superintelligent AIs, and even eventually get wiped out altogether.
And, as The Atlantic reports, some are taking that pervasive fear to striking extremes in their daily lives. Machine Intelligence Research Institute researcher Nate Soares, for instance, told the magazine that he’s even given up saving for his retirement, based on the assumption that AI has already guaranteed the final nail in humanity’s coffin.
“I just don’t expect the world to be around,” he said.
And Center for AI Safety director Dan Hendrycks told the magazine that he’s also expecting humanity to no longer be around by his retirement.
Their belief is part of a movement that argues we’re mere years away from an AI that evades our grasp and turns against us, a kind of dystopian fate that’s yanked straight out of the pages of a harrowing sci-fi novel.
But it’s not looking like pure fiction anymore. Numerous experts have warned that we aren’t sufficiently preparing for such an eventuality, dooming us to be subjugated — or worse — by a superintelligent AI.
We’ve come across countless theories of how all of this could play out. Earlier this year, researchers convened and broadly agreed that it’s only a matter of time until an AI gets hold of nuclear codes.
Researchers have also found that AIs are already showing an ominous dark side, even resorting to blackmailing human users at an astonishing rate when threatened with being shut down.
AI safety firm Palisade Research also caught one of OpenAI’s models sabotaging a shutdown mechanism to ensure that it would stay online.
Apart from ensuring their own survival, AIs could help human terrorists. In June, OpenAI warned in a blog post that advanced models could “assist highly skilled actors in creating bioweapons.”
Whether any of this is proof that we’re on a trajectory leading to our own extinction, however, remains to be seen. That’s despite the tech — in its current form — already causing plenty of harm, from flooding the internet with disinformation to triggering a wave of AI psychosis.
Glaring shortcomings of the tech are as evident as ever, with OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 AI model stumbling at the most basic of questions, even AI’s old nemesis of correctly counting the number of R’s in the word “strawberry.”
Still, one reason to take the doomsday prophesying seriously is that companies are becoming increasingly financially motivated to have AIs gain more and more control, as The Atlantic points out.
Meanwhile, given the Trump administration’s anti-regulation stance on the matter, companies like OpenAI are unlikely to be strongly motivated to implement effective guardrails to keep their AIs in check.
And whether that kind of freewheeling approach will lead to a total collapse of society almost feels beside the point, considering the many fires we’re already being forced to put out.
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