Will AI Kill Us? Or Make Us Hotter?
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Is the current AI panic just hype or a real existential threat?
Will AI end us all, or is this just a hype machine for what the companies actually want? This is Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm Naeem Arraza, and I'm joined today by a man who has been making sense of these Terminator-like headlines, Kevin Roos. He was at the New York Times for over a decade covering all things tech. He's the author of a forthcoming book called AGI Chronicles, The Inside Story of the Race to Create Artificial Superintelligences, and he's a co-host of the Machine God pod. That's very humble.
Well, it's not actually referring to me or my co-host Casey Newton, but this is what people in San Francisco, where we are, think they are building. They are building the machine God, the computer system that can take over the world and or save the world.
So it's not that they think they are God. In fact, they think they are the creators of God. They are pre-God. They're subservient to God.
I mean, these guys also do have this sort of God-like hubris, some of them.
I usually like a little foreplay, but we're just going to go straight to it today, Kevin. Will AI kill me? And how scared should I be? Smart girl. Dumb questions.
will ai kill you um i would say it depends right it depends on what we do to slow or stop the spread of of risks from ai give
me a life
expectancy so out here the way we measure it is something called p doom which is the the sort of the favored grim metric of the ai industry and you know sometimes people ask me you know what's your p doom and i i you know I thought I was pretty optimistic because I would say like, you know, 10%, 15%. And then I started telling people outside San Francisco and they're like, wait a minute, you think there's like a 10% or 15% chance that we all die from AI? And I was like, yeah, because I know people who think it's like a 75% chance. So I am something between an optimist and a pessimist. My P. Doom is something like 10% or 15%.
I've always thought like a 10% to 15% chance of the world ending is really optimistic. It's a Literally glass half full story. We've had, of course, Jeffrey Hinton on the podcast who was at a higher PDoom than yours, let's say. What was his? Well, he didn't give me a percentage. You know, the question I asked him that really stumped him was whether we should have kids in an AI world. And he said, if we didn't, we would really be giving up. But...
Yeah, I mean, I think people should have kids because it's fun to have kids. But I also know people in the AI world who have not had kids precisely for this reason, because they're like, if the world's going to end anyway, why would I subject another human to that? Which I think is fatalistic and bad. You shouldn't do that. But people out here are weird. I know one researcher who doesn't even wear sunscreen when he goes to the beach anymore because he's like, AI will either kill us all or it will solve skin cancer. And so either way, like, I don't need to worry about my sunburn.
Wow. It's like a complete release of agency. Okay. Well, you heard it here. Kevin Roos wants you to have children. There's a fertility president in the White House. There's a fertility podcaster on Machine God. But also wear
sunscreen.
That is
my position.
Stop stealing that commencement address. There's also people who are so optimistic, by the way, that they're waiting to have kids because like Alexander Wang of Scale AI, which was, of course, acquired by Meta, and now he's Meta's AI chief, wanted to wait until the neural networks are sufficient that he can just plug his baby's brain into the neural link or whatever to download. all the information in the world.
I'm telling you, if the average person outside of San Francisco had access to the dinner table conversations of AI insiders in San Francisco, it would kill them. They would die.
This
is how people talk out
here. Yeah, 100%. So do you think it's going to be like more Matrix, more Terminator, more Her, more 2001 Space Odyssey, or more Mean Girls? I could feel like AI could be like a really good Mean Girl.
Yeah.
I don't think it's going to be exactly like any of those.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Is the current AI panic just hype or a real existential threat?
0:00–7:38
2
How does Kevin Roose define his personal “P‑Doom” and why does he think it’s dropping?
7:38–14:16
3
Will AI end up like a Terminator, a Matrix, or something completely different?
14:16–21:26
4
What really happened in the Hugging Face hack and why was it a turning point?
21:26–29:50
5
Are AI companies using hype and IPO timing to create regulatory moats?
29:50–39:13
6
What are “embedded evaluators” and how could a global AI treaty work?
39:13–45:50
7
How much of the AI race is driven by personal rivalries between leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei?
45:50–54:15
8
Why does the U.S. want to sell powerful AI chips to China while claiming it must win the AI race?
54:15–58:52