Commentary: No, AI bots won't extinguish humanity on their own but you should worry about the humans behind them

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Set us as preferred If you’ve devoted even a moment’s attention to the vibes percolating within the zeitgeist, you’ve probably heard about the possibility that artificial intelligence is poised to extinguish us all.The current version of a scenario once chiefly identified with the Terminator movies and other examples of apocalyptic science-fiction derives from several episodes in which AI systems seemed to have developed minds of their own, escaped the control of their human developers and engaged in uncontrolled hacking sprees — “gone rogue” is the most common description.

If they can do that in 2026, who’s to say what they won’t be capable of even next year, or the year after that, and so on and so on?The field of AI, since its beginning, has been rife with often misleading anthropomorphic metaphors, with terms like ‘thinking,’ ‘learning,’ ‘reasoning,’ and ‘understanding’ glibly applied to very un-human-like computer processing.— Melanie Mitchell, Santa Fe InstituteThe full-blown panic over death-dealing AI was triggered by claims by a couple of current and former employees of Anthropic, one of our leading AI shops.Jacob Coxon, a researcher who left Anthropic after a few months of employment, warned on X that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic and OpenAI, where he also used to work, are “gambling with our lives.” Coxon was seconded by Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger, who estimated on X that there was a better than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans ...

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