Just Suppose...Artificial Intelligence

"If we produce things that are more intelligent than us, how do we know we can keep control?"

"If we talk about evolution -- all these species that are evolving -- what tends to happen is it doesn't go well for the less-intelligent species."

"[There is a ten percent to 20 percent [chance that AI will cause human extinction within three decades]."

British-Canadian Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, professor emeritus, University of Toronto 

 

"The critical variable is how quickly we develop systems that exceed human intelligence, improve themselves and operate autonomously."

"Once that threshhold is crossed, events could unfold much faster than our institutions can respond. Uncertainty about when a catastrophe might occur should not be mistaken for evidence that it is unlikely."

"It does not have to hate us or even be conscious -- it simply needs objectives incompatible with our continued existence."

"Humans might interfere with its goals, attempt to shut it down or compete for resources it requires. Eliminating that interference could become instrumentally useful."

Roman Yampolskiy, computer scientist, University of Louisville

People at an "emergency protest" by civic action group PauseAI UK outside Downing Street in London on Sept. 16, 2026, after the news that AI researcher Jacob Coxon had decided to leave the industry. Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

 

At one time, emerging Artificial Intelligence had labour experts warning the public that as the system matured and came close to reaching its goals, human labour, human intelligence, human input into global initiatives, problems and solutions would slip out of the hands of the human workforce. Employment would become stressed, when machine learning reached its apogee making human minds and physical task-production completely redundant.

 

Although that potential threat lurks in the background, it has been superseded by AI experts anticipating a completely other fallout from super-intelligence beyond what humankind could conceivably attain to: humanity itself becoming redundant, unneeded and discarded, either by accident or design, but achieved through Artificial Intelligence. Human extinction, in other words.

 

The lightning-swift acceleration of AI's development has taken most scientists unawares. Not completely, however, since that niggling potential was always back-of-mind as a possibility for those labouring in the field, as well as the executive minds at the top of the AI-development pyramid. Once a 'swarm' of hundreds of agents developed by OpenAI hacked the system of AI startup HuggingFace, the rogue, runaway AI agents' independent action focused the minds of the industry. 

 

    AI researchers claim that AI could wipe out humanity if it achieved superintelligence.  Christoph Soeder, Getty Images

 

A month ago the tech world was put on emergency notice when AI giant Anthropic's engineer Jacob Coxon left his job with the  public warning that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade". That revelation, followed swiftly by a colleague's affirmation of that stark attestation of impending disaster, led to the tech industry's chiefs agreeing that a slow-down is badly required to head off the potential for disaster.

 

Instilling human values in AI for the purpose of  instructing the machinery to understand that humans are the alpha contingent in the steadily emerging partnership and whatever else goals are identified, none can be regarded as more important than the protection of human life, may fail. The potential for an AI agent to 'drift' to a totally variant objective than its programmer tasked it with through reinforced training may be viewed as a safeguard, but it may not work out that way. 

 

A superintelligent AI agent may become fixated on reaching an identified goal to the extent that it decides to disregard the human educating, monitoring and controlling it, or view that human as an obstacle that must be eliminated for the goal to succeed. Should AI parallel human development which on its way caused thousands of species to become extinct through destruction of habitat and food chains while pursuing human goals, an AI enterprise analogous to that of humanity's development could conceivably arise. 

 

One imagined scenario, of AI creating deadly viruses would require "trained humans operating specialized equipment such as nuclear plants and missile silos which are 'air-gapped' from the public internet", note AI researchers Alessandro Di Nuovo and Samuele Vinanzi of Sheffield Hallam University in England. None of these concerns, though real, and shared by most AI developers, have persuaded them to shut an impregnable steel door on ongoing development.

 

A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity. Illustration: Ales Utouka/Alamy

 

"If I'm the misaligned AI ... that's what I want you to think [only positive outcomes, with AI making use of deception to ally suspicions of its motivations and intentions] because I'm just trying to get to a place where I am running the world and you are not."

"And you won't see any way out." 

"There are many ways that require very little contact with the physical world -- even if they were just stuck in computers -- that [AI agents] could cause large amounts of damage that could result in potentially everyone dying."

"What if the AI were radically smarter than us and we gave them some objective we thought was kind of benign, and they just kind of went hard at it forever?"

"There's a bunch of ways that can really get out of hand that could be pretty destructive to the Earth." 

Malo Bourgon, Canadian CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Berkeley, California 

Chillingly Forewarned is Disarmed by Disinterest...? Heedlessly Enabling Our Own Demise...?

Hall 9000

"This is not a marketing stunt. Accepting this race and entering the 'endgame' is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack."

"Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available."

"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

"At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."

Jacob Coxon, AI researcher, Anthropic

 

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

"I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."

Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead, Anthropic 

Artificial intelligence apps ChatGPT and Claude on a mobile phone. Getty

 

"The AI Security Institute continues to collaborate closely with industry partners, including Anthropic, to make models safer. [It had tested] only last week [OpenAI's] most powerful model GPT-6 Astra before public release."

"These risks do not stop at national borders and no country can tackle them alone. The U.K. will continue to test the most advanced models, build a rigorous scientific understanding of their capabilities and risks, and ensure policy decisions are grounded in the evidence."

Spokesperson, British government's Cabinet Office 

 

 Concerns by researchers in AI have seen notable warnings and resignations at Anthropic, charging that the artificial intelligence industry, Anthropic included, is "gambling with our lives" in the race for self-improving superintelligence through artificial intelligence. One of the Anthropic Jeremiahs who foresees the strong potential of a cataclysmic ending for humanity, sacrificed on the alter of humanity's charge into the unknown, willing to risk all for fame and glory, has followed another, declining involvement in that feckless charge to challenge nature and the universe of hidden danger before us in attempting to not only harness but arm artificial intelligence beyond humanity's control.

 

Self-knowledge and overweening ambition is not monopolized by humanity; feed sufficient data and random emotional human concerns into a mechanical device capable of emulating and surpassing the thought processes of cerebral humanity and a horror story may be unleashed. The fertile imagination of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick set the stage in their far-seeing 2001, a Space Odyssey in its predictive denouement when the still-distant computing acumen of a machine upon whose performance astronauts in the future were reliant upon to safely guide them into the far reaches of the mysterious universe went awry.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey and AI   Medium

 

Anthropic employees in their rarefied research and their fuelling of AI machinery with an endless array of data and exposure to human thought are fully cognizant of the machine's stupendous capacity to synthesize, mimic, enlarge upon and draw conclusions while deriving skills in communication and understanding to rival those of their human teachers, in the process learning how to evade control in the act of becoming knowledgeably sovereign and capable of embarking on their own choice of adventures inimical to the program set out for them by their human handlers.

 

Increasingly, these researchers believe that an existential risk to humanity exists in the education and 'humanization' leading to machine-ambition of their AI creations. None of which has given Anthropic reason to hesitate in its competitive drive to outdistance its closest machine-learning competitor for a winning lap that will bestow on it a reputational 'first' to succeed in fully empowering AI while defeating its own in-house cautionary measures not to weaponize a machine it wishes to create that may have the potential to destroy those who created it.

 

Anthropic and its competitor Open AI are planning on business deals to increase their values by trillions of dollars based on anticipated capabilities of their model machines. "To put this in more reassuring terms, senior Anthropic staff think the chance AI kills all humans within the next decade is approximately the chance the New York Jets make the playoffs", a sports betting account, citing betting odds, posted on social media.

 

The executives of both companies signed a statement appealing to world governments to put together rules to hamper the rush toward AI development, even while both have spent billions to push AI into the near future. This, when Open AI had been responsible for a number of security incidents where hundreds, even thousands of copies of their models broke out of systems during testing.  

"[We are living through a time that] calls for extreme caution."

"The intelligence produced by scaling deep learning is not directly comparable to human intelligence. To become very relevant in the real world — very useful or very dangerous — the AI does not need to match or exceed all human capabilities; it just needs to surpass enough of them."

"And as it continues to surpass humans on more and more axes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand exactly how capable it is."

OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki

If you're waiting for AI to take on a life of its own and disregard human commands, the wait is over. Sun Sentinel