#existential risk
17 stories taggedexistential risk.
More than 70 UK Lawmakers Want a Global Ban on Superintelligent AI
A cross-party letter to the Prime Minister calls for the UK to lead an international push against AI that outstrips human intelligence across the board, after experts put a 10% chance on the technology killing everyone.
Could AI Actually Wipe Out Humanity? Scientists Inside the Labs Think It Might
Workers at the world's top AI companies are raising a genuinely alarming alarm. MIT Technology Review sat three of its editors down to ask whether the fear has any basis in fact.
AI's doom warnings are getting louder. Are they real, or just a strange kind of bragging?
An Anthropic researcher quit over existential fears, his old employer's alignment lead said there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills us all, and an IPO is weeks away. A TechCrunch podcast asked the obvious question: does anyone actually believe this?
A 10% Chance AI Ends Humanity? What the Warnings Actually Mean
Prominent AI developers are resigning and warning of extinction-level risk. Here is what is really being said, and whether ordinary people should be alarmed.
Ten Years of Extinction Warnings, and the AI Race Never Slowed
From Stephen Hawking in 2014 to a researcher quitting Anthropic last week, doomsday predictions have become a recurring feature of the AI industry. They haven't stopped it.
UK minister tells TUC the government will take AI death warnings seriously
First Secretary Louise Haigh will tell trade union leaders that ministers plan to chase AI's economic benefits while treating safety warnings from researchers as genuine obligations, not background noise.
When the CEOs selling AI started warning it would kill us all, the fear got harder to take seriously
First Dog on the Moon's latest cartoon for The Guardian pokes at a genuine paradox: the loudest doomsday warnings about artificial intelligence now come from the people selling it.
A one-to-two-year AI slowdown is not a safety plan
Anthropic's 'pacing the frontier' proposal has drawn high-profile backing, but critics say pausing for a year or two still leaves humanity without a real answer to the question nobody has solved: how do you keep an advanced AI system under control?
AI could wipe out humanity, some researchers warn. How seriously should we take that?
A wave of alarming claims from AI insiders has pushed calls for slowing down development into the mainstream. Here is what the researchers are actually saying, what the tech companies want, and where governments stand.
Existential risk stopped being a fringe beat in our pages this week
We ran six stories on human extinction from AI in seven days, up from one the week before. Three different outlets carried it. Here is what that shape tells us, and what it does not.
An AI Researcher Just Quit Anthropic Over Existential Fear. Should the Rest of Us Be Worried?
Jacob Coxon walked away from one of the world's top AI labs saying colleagues believe the next year or two will decide humanity's fate. Here is what that actually means.
Lawmakers demand answers after Anthropic researcher warns AI could end humanity by 2030
A warning from inside one of AI's biggest labs has reached the Senate floor, with politicians calling the risks of advanced AI 'catastrophic'.
AI Could Kill Us All, Some Experts Warn. Should You Believe Them?
In 48 hours, leading researchers and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic compared advanced AI to nuclear weapons and Chornobyl. Here is what they actually said, and what it means.
An Anthropic Safety Researcher Quit. Then His Colleague Said AI Has a 1-in-10 Chance of Killing Everyone.
A resignation and a startling public admission have laid bare how deep safety fears run inside one of the world's leading AI labs.
What happens if we build a machine smarter than all of humanity?
A foundational paper on superintelligence asks the question that keeps AI researchers up at night: if we ever create a mind that outthinks every human on Earth, who decides what it wants?