AI - A 50% chance of human extinction?

[Solongasnake]

AIBU to think that this is more important than anything else that's going on? Is there anything we, as individuals banding together, can do? Or do we just have to sit back and accept it, on behalf of our children as well as ourselves? I've read predictions that AI will become more intelligent than humans in the next couple of years, and that to stop that, action needs to be taken in the next year.

"Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI and Google DeepMind and as chief scientist at the UK’s AI Safety Institute, said warnings about AI risks understated the dangers.
“There’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems,” he said, adding that actions taken over the next two to 10 years would be decisive.

OpenAI’s David Robinson announced his departure at the weekend, saying “the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough” as they sprint from one product launch to the next.
His view was endorsed by Miles Brundage, an AI policy researcher who worked at OpenAI for six years. He said he regretted helping “spread the idea of iterative deployment”, which may have made sense when AI was less powerful “but makes no sense at all after many deaths have been tied to AI and as we’re careening towards extinction-level risks”.

www.msn.com/en-gb/technology/artificial-intelligence/accept-bad-things-in-return-for-benefits-of-ai-says-sam-altman/ar-AA2dBJA6?ctsrc=dgst&ocid=edgntpruby

Haven't you seen The Matrix?

No.😀

I'm terrified and powerless. Looking down the barrel of job losses, misinformation, art loss, cyber attacks, autonomous warfare and possibly biological warfare and there is nothing I can do about it.

A bunch of billionaires who are telling us we are all going to lose our jobs and/or die are doing whatever they want.

Even if extinction isn't on the cards, what will I tell my children? If you try hard in school you can grow up to be nothing.

You don’t know enough about it, sorry. An AI agent operates independently without any human intervention, that’s what makes it so terrifying. just look at what happened over the summer.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/08/openai-rogue-models-hugging-face-investigation

I feel the same OP but you’re asking in the wrong forum about it because based on the responses here, most don’t have a fucking clue judging by the ignorant comments.

I think people think Terminator and dismiss how dangerous it is based on that, rather than thinking about the very real impacts that can have devastating consequences.

Issues that can easily happen are:

• mass surveillance and suppression of alternative viewpoints (already happening)
• weakening of the power of people who have lost their leverage over the economy (no jobs - no leverage)
• automated warfare with drones in the millions in the hands of dangerous governments
• biological warfare used by terrorist groups or individual bad actors
• wealth inequality like we have never seen before with no power to counteract it - no jobs means no democratic leverage.
• AI targeted misinformation to undermine democracies (already happening and will get more sophisticated).

There are so many ways this can be catastrophic. We have such a short window to fully police this, to prevent the misinformation campaigns before they can start or plan a pathway for the economy that features massive job losses.

I have a few hopes.

• One is that the compute power needed for a world like the above exceeds possible data centre build out or power generation - but that seems unlikely because data centres are already being built to the detriment of human beings and the environment.
• Another is the prediction that AI has a ceiling and it will not advance beyond that point akin to model collapse, however current AI is enough to do significant damage.
• My third hope is that companies, many of whom are not multibillion pound monopolies, will start to realise that they will implode without people having jobs to buy their products. If enough of this happens, we might see AI improve productivity without the loss of employment. Or as soon as governments start to lose power (because money is being funneled away to AI companies) they might earnestly start legislating before all power is lost. Perhaps this will encourage self sufficiency in nations rather than outsourcing everything with humanity forward international trading. Perhaps a leisure based economy will emerge giving people power again, if people have more time to engage in leisure then the demand will grow, and leisure based activities tend to be more tactile so people will be employed.

Overall I think it's a desperately sad era for humanity. We are trying to outsource intelligence, thinking and creativity and in return we get a highly volatile civilisation with some vague promise of curing cancer if we don't all die.

All I want is to see my children grow up and live a beautiful life. That's it, and every day I feel so desperately sad it might not happen and I can do nothing to protect them. My son talks about what he wants to do when he grows up and at this point I feel like I'm just pretending everything is ok so he can keep believing that. My children mean everything to me, but they mean nothing to the people making decisions for their future.

If this technology was coming during an era of global cooperation and peace it would be less terrifying, but it's coming at a time where we have active genocides, invasions, despots, poverty, dictatorships, unregulated misinformation, extreme wealth inequality and an active crumbling of once strong international treaties.