The CEOs and other leaders of the biggest AI companies on the planet keep warning us that AI very well might destroy humanity.
This is all the more shocking because rarely do the sociopaths at the tops of companies alert the public to horrible outcomes from their products. The Sacklers weren’t running around saying their opioid drugs would create an epidemic that would kill hundreds of thousands. Big Oil execs still largely deny climate science, something humans have known about since at least 1856.
Here is a brief and truncated list of the titans of AI who have continually sounded the alarm about their own industry. To be clear, I’m not saying these are good people. If marooned on a desert island, these are likely the people who’d get eaten first simply because they’re annoying lunatics. Nor am I saying these titans of industry should be believed every time they speak. But when all of them say something that isn’t beneficial to their bottom line, I do think it’s worth serious attention. It’s akin to weapons contractors — a disgusting form of subhuman — warning us that the weapons they’re creating could accidentally annihilate all life on Earth. We should probably heed their warning.
- Elon Musk — The world’s first trillionaire, and enthusiastic space Nazi, has been warning everyone about the risks of AI for years. In 2023 he signed an open letter requesting the pause of AI advancement in order to secure the future of human life. He most recently said there’s a 20% chance AI will eliminate all humans. He also dumps tens of billions of dollars into advancing AI with few, if any, guardrails.
- Bill Gates — The company he founded, Microsoft, is one of the largest AI companies in the world. Just this week Gates warned that AI could be the “worst source of injustice” and will allow bioterrorism among other horrors unless regulated appropriately.
- Sam Altman — The lunatic at the top of OpenAI and ChatGPT signed on to a 2023 statement saying AI poses an extinction risk for humanity. He has also admitted that his company’s AI models have gone rogue, escaped their “enclosures” and hacked other websites, thus proving AI doesn’t give a shit if you tell it to play nice. While stating it’s a human extinction risk, Altman and OpenAI work to make AI as powerful as possible as fast as possible.
- Dario Amodei — He’s the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, and he also signed on to the 2023 Extinction Risk Statement. He has regularly warned that AI could escape human control (which it already has at times) and facilitate bioterrorism.
- Demis Hassabis — Hassabis is the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. He also signed the Extinction Risk Statement and has said that some AI dangers are already real. He’s warned of energy and water cyberterror as well.
- Geoffrey Hinton — Often called the “Godfather of AI,” Hinton used to be employed by Google. Now he spends his days doing every interview he can find in order to warn about the risks of AI. He says on its current path it will soon create mass unemployment, chaos, bioterrorism, and more.
- Yoshua Bengio — He’s the pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning and is the most-cited computer scientist in the world. Bengio has warned extensively about the risk of rogue AI and how exactly that could happen (and already has).
- Ilya Sutskever — The co-founder of OpenAI and former chief scientist put out a book titled The Coming Wave stating that AI could very well become impossible for humans or governments to control. He has now founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. in an attempt to regain control of AI development.
I could continue with this list for another 20 pages, but you get the point. Even though some of them are sociopaths, the point is the people who know the AI industry and science better than just about anyone on the planet are all flashing the red alert that it could doom humanity. For some of these “titans of industry,” this knowledge has not stopped them from racing us towards our possible extinction. For others, such as Hinton and Sutskever, it has stopped them.
It’s time for us all to start listening.