Are the AI industry’s apocalyptic warnings just a marketing ploy?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the UN that if “managed poorly,” AI models “could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” | John Lamparski/Bloomberg via Getty Images Silicon Valley has long warned that its favorite technology might get us all killed. But chatter about AI’s apocalyptic potential has grown louder in recent weeks. In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, accusing his former employer of “gambling with our lives” by developing evermore powerful models faster than it could control them. One of Coxon’s former colleagues vouched for this assessment, saying that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade. Recent pronouncements from the leaders of these companies have been nearly as grim. At the United Nations last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that, if “managed poorly,” AI models “could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman similarly declared that our species just might “lose control of the future” to the type of software that his firm is selling. All this triggered a tsunami of media coverage and policy debate about the “existential risks” of AI — and what, if anything, we can do about them. Key takeaways Some...
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