Artificial intelligence could end the world, top researchers warn

“The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World,” the New York Times warns ominously.

Actually, that’s way too weak a word. It’s… pretty frightening.

Columnist Stephen Witt writes: “The A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, is the most-cited researcher alive, in any discipline. When I spoke with him in 2024, Dr. Bengio told me that he had trouble sleeping while thinking of the future. Specifically, he was worried that an A.I. would engineer a lethal pathogen – some sort of super-coronavirus – to eliminate humanity. ‘I don’t think there’s anything close in terms of the scale of danger,’ he said.”

Yes, this is balanced with Meta’s AI chief, who sees a new era of prosperity, but which are you going to remember longer? I’d wager it’s the guy who can’t sleep.

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The Washington Post joins the apocalyptic rhetoric race:

“Will AI destroy us? Consider the Nature of Intelligence.”

University of Chicago professor Eric Oliver says: “The fear about artificial intelligence is not just that AI will take our jobs, wreck our politics or degrade our ability to think, but something far worse: AI will destroy humanity itself.”

Have a nice day!

What’s more, Oliver writes, “many observers fear that once these new AI systems achieve such autonomous intelligence, they will attempt to eradicate us as a threat to their survival. Some industry leaders put the probability of such a cataclysm at 25% – though the data behind those estimates remains mysterious.”

So there’s a 1 in 4 chance that artificial intelligence – created by humans, of course – will wipe us from the face of the earth. Look at the bright side: that’s a 3 in 4 chance we’ll be able to live out our lives.

Over the last year, there’s been a positive A.I. boomlet: Check out ChatGPT! You can create weird pictures or videos. Kids use it for homework (not so great) but so do their teachers. It’s fun, frantic and non-fattening. Elon Musk created his X version, called Grok.

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Every new technology has doomed jobs but spawned greater efficiency. The invention of the car all but wiped out the horse-and-buggy business. The advent of radio, television and the interwebs weren’t great for telegraph companies or manual typewriters. Somehow, society adapted. 

But now we’re suddenly in a new, darker “Twilight Zone.” It sounds counter-intuitive that since scientists created A.I., they can’t control it. And it still makes plenty of mistakes.

It can transform our broken politics, which are increasingly dominated by social media and podcasts. Hakeem Jeffries was furious when Donald Trump depicted him with a handlebar mustache and sombrero, though at least that was obvious.

Yet, the darker side has started to emerge. Celebrities, including long-dead figures, are reincarnated in creepy ways.  

As another Post story notes, “Ilyasah Shabazz didn’t want to look at the AI-generated videos of her father, Malcolm X. The seemingly realistic clips – made by OpenAI’s new video-maker Sora 2 – show the legendary civil rights activist making crude jokes, wrestling with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and talking about defecating on himself…

“One video showed police body-camera footage of Whitney Houston looking intoxicated. In some clips, King makes monkey noises during his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, basketball player Kobe Bryant flies aboard a helicopter mirroring the crash that killed him and his daughter in 2020, and John F. Kennedy makes a joke about the recent killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.”

Yeah, good taste not exactly required. I’ve watched some of these, and they are unnervingly realistic – except for the fact that I have a brain that immediately sees them as illogical.

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Times tech columnist Kevin Roose says, “A.I. has essentially replaced Google for me for basic questions: What setting do I put this toaster oven on to make a turkey melt? How do I stop weeds from growing on my patio? I use it for interior decorating – I’ll upload a photo of a room in my house and say, ‘Give this room a glow-up, tell me what furniture to buy and how to arrange it and generate the ‘after’ picture.’”  

We created this Frankenstein, and it’s starting to act like a monster. Yes, artificial intelligence was molded by people, so it seems strange that its creators didn’t – or couldn’t – build in some safety measures. But the dire warnings are reminding many of us of the old sixties protest song, “You don’t believe we’re on the Eve of Destruction.”