There’s no shortage of fantastical possibilities, most involving the speculative concept of superintelligent AI.
Earlier this month, artificial intelligence researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic after just four months. In an announcement on X, he stated: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
A senior member of Anthropic’s staff, Evan Hubinger, actually agreed with Coxon, adding he personally thinks the chance of this happening in the next decade is more than 10 percent.
Understandably, these statements made waves. There’s now lots of talk about slowing down AI research and increasing “human control” over the technology.
But how exactly might AI kill us all? There’s no shortage of fantastical scenarios, and most of them involve the concept of “superintelligent” AI—that is, AI that’s more capable than humans.
I’ve distilled these scenarios down to the top five, ordering them roughly from most vague to most precise. And I’d argue the list is also ordered from least probable to most probable.
AI doomers often justify their concerns by means of an annoying catch-22 paradox: how can we possibly imagine what a superintelligence might do to take out less intelligent beings like us?
We’d have to be superintelligent to predict what a superintelligence would be able to do. It’s like asking your family dog to imagine thermonuclear war.
The good news here is that superintelligence is still perhaps some distance away. Current AI models are really good at solving particular problems, but that’s not the same as being more intelligent than a human in all domains .
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