Could AI Really Kill Us All?
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Why are people fearing that AI could wipe out humanity?
Is AI really about to kill us all? Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus, the show that pits facts against the fallout from AI.
We've been hearing for years that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. And this is often coming from the very people who run the biggest AI companies in the world.
I think AI will probably, like most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world by chance that something goes, you know, really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of of you know human civilization, you know, it might be somewhere between 10 and 25%. Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes.
Just recently, a researcher named Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic, said that some of the people working on this tech really think that it could kill us all in the next 10 years. This journalist asked him,
You truly believe that AI could kill us all in less than a decade? Yes, I do, and um it's not just mi. Many people working in the industry, including people, executives, senior researchers, all genuinely believe that there is a substantial probability that this technology could kill everyone.
And one of the big events that everyone is pointing to to say, look how scary this tech is, is an incident that happened at OpenAI, where their AI model broke into the infrastructure of another tech company called Hugging Face.
Two of its advanced models escaped their testing environment known as a sandbox and hacked into another AI company's internal systems.
Tech companies Anthropic and Meta have since come out basically saying, us too, us too, we've caught our AI models hacking into other companies as well. With this mad news coming from AI, it has understandably gotten a lot of people freaked out, saying it is time to slow all of this down.
It really cannot be overstated how crazy this is. This is like out of a Hollywood movie. Pause AI development. Ідесна тулей то авой дизаста. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.
But meanwhile, there is another group of people out there who are saying Hold on a minute. All these fears about the AI apocalypse. What a load of baloney. This is just a distraction, or even weirder, some marketing ploy by these AI companies to make their tech seem super powerful. So today on the show, how worried do we need to be here? Are we really on the brink of an AI apocalypse? Or is this all just a bit overblown? I mean, are we really just freaking out about the same robots that had to be dragged off stage at a dance competition? When it comes to the AI apocalypse, there's a lot of people saying
I think AI will probably, like most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world.
The then. They're science. If you have a friend who is freaking out about the AI apocalypse, and I know you do because everyone is right now. Send them this episode. Give them some real science to hold on to. Science versus the AI apocalypse is coming up.
Welcome back. Today we are finding out how worried we need to be about the AI apocalypse. Is AI really about to kill us all? And to tell us all about it is my AI agent, Meryl Horn. Hi, Meryl. Hey, Wendy. I'm joking, I'm joking. Yeah, I have to say it these days. Not funny anymore, is it? I don't have an AI agent. I'm real. I wanna start with what happened at Hugging Face. Because I know this was a little while ago now. Things move fast in the world of AI, but it's really Really the one event that everyone keeps coming back to to say, look how scary this tech has gotten. These companies can't control their technology. So many headlines. It's gone rogue. AI's gone rogue. You know. So I really want to go through what happened and was it as scary?
as basically the headlines are saying.
Yeah, let's look at what actually happened there because the the details are really wild and kind of creepy.
Oh man. Okay. Let's go.
Yeah, so we talked about what happened here with David Perry. He's a professor at Murdoch University in Australia and specializes in cybersecurity. And he said that the thing that set this whole incident off was that OpenAI had given some of its models a little assignment.
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