Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/06/15/humanity-isnt-ready-for-the-coming-intelligence-explosion

by andsoitis • 1 month ago

191 508 1 month ago

al_borland5• 1 month ago

Experts in artificial intelligence estimate...

The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someone lose their "expert" title?

andsoitis• 1 month ago

They have been wrong in a way that's bad: underestimating the speed and size of progress. So if the "experts" claim a timeline and magnitude, it would be safest to assume an even faster timeline and a bigger impact.

mikepurvis• 1 month ago

In fairness, they've been operating with a lot of built up cynicism from major breakthroughs that have been 3-5 years away for the past five decades.

m463• 1 month ago

I wonder...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

SpicyLemonZest5• 1 month ago

Do you have an example of a prediction they’ve made in the last 3 years that was drastically wrong? This is not my impression.

al_borland5• 1 month ago

Do you think all white collar work will be replaced by AI in 18 months?

https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...

Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...

ianm2182• 1 month ago

Do you have a source on aggregate predictions of experts being drastically wrong?

I.e. the AI 2027 guys were memed for being AI lunatics on a lot here and they have been pretty on the money in terms of pace of progress accelerating/ gov moving towards nationalization/ coding agents

Retric4• 1 month ago

Do you have specific and objective examples of things people got right?

From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.

somenameforme2• 1 month ago

No they haven't. They've even 'officially' declared that their AI apocalypse has been postponed to another date [1], just out of reach, but close enough to be scary. Though in the quotes there the doomsayers are also already pre-hedging for why AI 2030 also won't come to pass.

[1] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-the-ai-2027-dooms...

7777332215• 1 month ago

The AI companies are trying to manufacture the appearance of what they foretold before it all falls apart horribly.

koe123• 1 month ago

Expertise in naval gazing and science fiction writing is a prerequisite.

fnordpiglet4• 1 month ago

It’s hard to take seriously a statement like this that’s grounded in “the last three years” when trends have tended to play out over decades. The fact the goal posts have moved from thousands to hundreds to decades to single digit years for massive transformation should give you a moment of pause in your bag saying.

I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when.

In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.

bdamm2• 1 month ago

Autonomous weapons are actually a really interesting branch of this and deserves a little more.

Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end.

This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either.

That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.

al_borland5• 1 month ago

I said 3 years, because that’s how long ago ChatGPT was released to the public. Since then we’ve been told that all of us should be out of a job in 6 months, every 6 months, for those 3 years.

I agree that change happens on a longer timeline. This is why I’m so tired of statements like this…

“Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner…”

These “experts” are pulling timelines out of the sky, and these predictions are leading to reckless behavior from CEOs and executives which have a material impact on people’s lives. But they get clicks on their blogs and funding for their startup… I guess that’s all that matters.

Waterluvian2• 1 month ago

Those are the experts who were wrong. These are the experts who are right. We sacked the experts who are wrong and replaced them with the experts who are right.

“How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.

mdp2021• 1 month ago

Namely? Who sacked who, who confirmed who?

DrBazza• 1 month ago

Channeling your inner Douglas Adams.

heresie-dabord• 1 month ago

We had to put good people in charge to get rid of the bad people. The bad people were ruining our economy. They needed to be punished.

Schools needed to be punished too. There was a branch of knowledge called Science, and it was badly run and terribly elitist. These people would talk for hours and never in ALL CAPS. They used alot of big words and produced alot of theories. Forms of lies that they literally called form-you-lies. They were fanatics and would never agree on anything. Very frustrating.

Then a new kind of brave, talented politician made Science accountable to our heroic leadership. Suddenly there were new medications and rocket ships everywhere, enough for every person, woman, man, camera, TV. It was literally called a golden age because the right people acquired mountains of gold. Elections were no longer necessary. They were all rigged anyway.

There was a magazine called The Expertist or The Economix. Not really very good, but sometimes it did praise our heroic leadership, which was good.

That magazine published a long text that said,

It is common thinking in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC that any regulation would put American firms at a disadvantage because they cannot trust Chinese competitors to abide by the rules.

And this was true, because no one else can be trusted, they should all be punished. Punishing others is how you get the best deals. Only our heroic leadership makes good rules for everyone else in the world to follow.

raincole• 1 month ago

The predictions of these "experts"... last 3 years.

Which ones? Please be specific.

somesortofthing• 1 month ago

Have they? I don't like it either but the headline bull predictions(reliable agents and most code written by AI by mid-2026, dramatic progress against jailbreaks, prompt injection, hallucination, etc., major improvements despite pretraining data exhaustion, continued exponential growth on the METR trendline) did come true, often ahead of even aggressive schedules. What major wrong predictions did you have in mind?

bigstrat20032• 1 month ago

Literally none of the predictions you listed in your post came true. We don't have reliable agents, AI isn't writing most code, hallucinations still happen all the time, improvement has been basically non-existent. Despite the constant claims of these experts and AI boosters, AI is still not a tool one can use to get meaningful work done.

sleepyguy• 1 month ago

http://archive.today/2OWwO

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

Humanity doesn't fully leverage the intelligence it already has, so I think people are overestimating the disruption ahead.

yepyoukno• 1 month ago

For sure. Intelligence is an internal human problem, not one external. I cannot see how apps doing the thinking will help the ordinary person so substantially as imaginations anticipate.

cjbgkagh• 1 month ago

That’s from a lack of intelligence not an abundance. An intelligent society would already be maximizing the productivity of its intelligent population.

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

Intelligence of individuals doesn't automatically translate to a society behaving intelligently

supertroop• 1 month ago

Depends what country you are in. The US government seems to be averse to intelligence, whereas China fosters it. Kinda strange that the US is falling behind, I never imagined the day.

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

China fosters it

so long as it's not used to dissent from the government

wartywhoa237• 1 month ago

Don't fall for 5D PR chess stunts.

That which must be embraced in the future per certain agenda, must be made looking like it's persecuted and oppressed in the present, per any textbook on narratives.

Terr_• 1 month ago

The intelligence it already has

Makes me think of a Stephen Jay Gould quote:

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

smitty1e• 1 month ago

"recursive self-improvement (RSI)"

My aching joints enter the chat...

esafak4• 1 month ago

I think it is so reckless and unethical that AI companies are not spending good money on answering the political, social, economical, moral questions that they are raising.

beering• 1 month ago

Would you rather have the AI companies answer those questions, or your elected government?

Fwiw, the AI companies have been saying a lot about these questions should be answered. Whether you want their answers is another story.

esafak4• 1 month ago

They have to act together. Universities should take part too. Let's get these national and international forums started.

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

It's so sad that you've got more downvotes than upvotes

edg50003• 1 month ago

The AI companies will become part of govenment in the way banks have. They'll have very close ties and effectively govern in all but name.

ipdashc2• 1 month ago

Right, makes sense, if they just spent a bunch of money they could answer all of those "political, social, economical, moral questions". All of these unprecedented sociological and labor market changes flying towards us are trivially solvable, we just need to... what, hire a few dozen economists? Fund a team of philosophers to think about it really hard for a few months?

esafak4• 1 month ago

You are right; a bunch of trillion dollar companies that are cracking artificial intelligence couldn't possibly muster the resources to solve such problems, so they ought to plow full steam ahead and let everyone else worry about the fallout.

kurthr• 1 month ago

I wanted this to be thought provoking, but for a physicist to open with, "the acceptable risk of catastrophic meltdown for a nuclear power plant is roughly one in a million", just seems sad. It is a phrase without meaning.

   Is it per plant? there aren't a million.
   Is it per year? notably have been at least 2 major ones (arguably 7).

A meltdown (or loss of containment) just isn't that bad, if it doesn't affect ground water or lead to atmospheric fallout. We're turning 3 Mile Island back on to power an AI datacenter! The AI super-intelligence apocalypse envisioned (ignoring the likelihood) is inherently global.

That said, the rest of the analysis and proposal also greatly disappoints me. The idea that the current administrations of US and China could do anything constructive seems hilarious. They're so paranoid and self-serving they couldn't come together, even if there was an alien invasion. Then the idea that LLM safety is somehow as easily traceable as nuclear isotopes and bomb tests seems equally ludicrous. I am sad.

thunderbong• 1 month ago

Honestly, this article has too many words which don't mean anything.

'AI Experts', 'superintelligence', and hand-waving doom scenarios.

As an example-

Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.

I've heard these same objections in my lifetime about the internet. And I've read similar arguments against TV, radio, the phonograph, and the printing press.

Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways.

Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it.

King-Aaron• 1 month ago

Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it.

Looking at the people in charge of these companies, and the sheer lack of understanding by the broad consumer market using them, I have nothing but pessimism about the direction that this technology takes us.

marcyb5st• 1 month ago

Yeah, big lol on the Recursive Self-Improvement.

I mean, firstly you get to have an "Agent" actually capable of really long horizon tasks without getting stuck in tools loops and having its context rot. Secondly, each trial (ie a model fully trained to convergence) costs millions and takes O(weeks). You can probably run 1 or 2 of those experiments in parallel even at big AI labs as the hardware is scarce and they are costly as mentioned before. Assuming this agent needs something like a hundred tries to just show some improvement, we are looking at years.

And you can't early stop training for candidates that are not promising due to "emerging capabilities". At some point you might get a big drop in loss even if the model has been plateuing for a while. And you can't really scale down models for running trials quickly either also due to these emerging capabilities. In fact you might create a model that is great at converging with in small trials (fewer params, fewer tokens), but that is uncapable of developing those unexpected traits. And this will likely happen as you created a sort of evolutionary pressure in this direction: if you are good at learning in the first few epochs you "survive" and get to pass down your traits to future trials.

All of this to say that recursive-self-improvement is waaaaaay out of our grasp as things stand right now. We need another one or two breakthroughs to get there (IMHO).

threethirtytwo3• 1 month ago

Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways.

Common human trope is to rely on analogies and past patterns to predict the future. It blinds you reality.

This isn't some new "invention". What's happening is fundamentally more profound. the stakes are much much much more higher and the consequences much more grave. Thus a historical analogy can't save you when the situation is categorically different.

I agree it's getting "tiring" but this is another common human trope. You see the same thing too many times and you lose the sense of danger that comes with it. It's like sky diving all the time. You eventually lose the fear via repetition, but fundamentally speaking, you are still parachuting out of a fucking plane.

pydry• 1 month ago

The Economist reflects the views and biases of economic and political elites.

AI has turned into something of a religion for them because the substitution of technology for labor is a reflection of one of their deepest desires. Whatever the reality of the situation, they want to believe that AGI employees are imminent.

ifwinterco• 1 month ago

There’s a meme in finance circles that by the time some trend appears on the economist front cover it’s a top signal and time to get out of the trade and this is why.

It’s a very normie magazine written by and for normies, and by the time an idea has got that far down the easy money has already been made

Schlagbohrer7• 1 month ago

By the time it appears on People Magazine that must be the third or fourth dead cat bounce!

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest AI laboratories

Or to have AI regulated in their favor

somenameforme2• 1 month ago

Exactly. Now that Anthropic has gotten to experience that getting the government involved doesn't necessarily mean they get to sit on throne surrounded by a deep moat, I expect their messaging to be adjusted. They're going to want to keep the hype train rolling to keep the dough flowing, but they can't ramp it up to 11 anymore because the government actually is listening now. And Reagan's 9 words have never been more true.

cortesoft• 1 month ago

I couldn't read the whole article, but just from the part I could read:

Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest ai laboratories.

I don't know, they also have an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful, and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe is a way to promote that idea.

holmesworcester3• 1 month ago

https://archive.ph/2OWwO

holmesworcester3• 1 month ago

If AI is now ascending an economic learning curve from:

1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now)

2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?)

3. RSI (?)

4. Being smarter than any living person at every intellectual task (?)

5. Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans (10-100 years?)

...And all of the scientific and resource-allocation institutions that brought us the computer and the second half of the 20th century are now fixated on this learning curve, what universe can we possibly imagine where this is not transformative and powerful?

Honestly the only one I can think of is one in which we kill almost everyone in some other way first, and contrary to what you read in the news, almost everyone dying is not what the trend line has been from existing problems like war, disease, or even climate change.

Also, just to pre-empt a common quibble: when I say "AI" I mean the set of all AI and their combined decision vector, not any one AI, so conflicting interests within the set of AI's will not save anyone any more than the conflicting interests of colonizers saved indigenous Americans.

notarobot1232• 1 month ago

Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans

Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart?

I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it.

It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.

consumer4515• 1 month ago

Here is an issue I think about often, but I am not quite sure how to put it into words.

We have many extremely smart people in various fields. Executives, politicians, and society generally ignore them and do whatever they want. I don't believe that lack of access to intelligence is our problem. How is "free" intelligence going to improve this?

I don't just mean climate, but business planning, health, risk assessment, everything.

protocolture• 1 month ago

What makes you think you can assume that it will continue geometrically forever?

petre• 1 month ago

and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe

Possibly, but by using up resources, not by its output. Its draw on resources will definitely accelerate climate change to create slop.

Nevermark3• 1 month ago

an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful

I have no frame of reference to process this.

Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same. Transistor, 79 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. Integrated circuit, 68 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. "Attention is all you need", 9 years. ChatGPT, 4 years, explosive growth in instances and power. Humans species, not getting smarter. [0,1,2,3]

There is a syndrome where many people seem unable to perceive or reason about rates of change in technology.

We are going to spend the vast majority of our future lives without the intelligence crown.

In terms of verbally expressible knowledge, models are passing many people completely, and passing all of our individually respectively weak reasoning areas.

Other modalities are progressing very quickly.

There will be short periods where progress happens quickly, but the impact feels slow. There will be radical changes that feel slow too, because if something anticipated or important isn't instant, we tend to perceive it as slow.

But it won't be slow. And it won't be long. We are smart in a kind of pick the-best-of-us at the-best-of-times way. We are rarely consistently or broadly smart individually.

We are not in the same galaxy as "ready". What would that look like?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model

dbspin2• 1 month ago

Agree with most of this, it's well articulated and captures how we react to change.

However - 'Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same' is an enormous misconception. That fact that we lack gross anatomical changes during this period, ignores everything we now know about punctuated equilibrium and rapid evolution. It's highly probably we've had an enormous number of evolved psychological changes during the last few hundred, and even tens of thousands of years. Changes that relate to our capacity to live in large groups, adapt to urban environments, resist disease and so on. We know that's the case simply because acute pandemics become epidemics through herd immunity, and through the acquisition of lactose tolerance etc.

It seems highly unlikely that adaptations stop there. Altering the environment (in the last 10K years that means the built environment) alters the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It seems likely that we've essentially domesticated out much of our propensity for violence and increased our capacity for mood regulation.

Obviously it's incredibly tricky to pair these specific behavioural changes to genetic changes -> protein synthesis -> behaviour. Bearing in mind though we're only 20 years out from the first study to link allele variant to behaviour (the COMT Val/Met polymorphism), and the potential controversy around such research, this shouldn't be surprising.

randusername• 1 month ago

You're applying broad, long-term, and high-level reasoning to motivations that are more likely short-term and driven by simplistic incentives.

Begging for regulation (and input into precisely what that regulation is) relieves competition, consolidating dependency among the established players, and spreads a very effective fear narrative that what these companies are doing will change everything and therefore they are worthy of mind-boggling capex and valuations.

We have to quit seeing humanist visionaries where the evidence shows businessmen with access to the best strategy and PR counsel around.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 month ago

Experts in artificial intelligence estimate the risk of an AI-caused catastrophic event at 10-50%.

I don't think it's that high but can we put that aside and focus on the 100% chance that it's being used to enshittify every part of our lives?

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

Is it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities?

Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes?

Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?

dataviz1000• 1 month ago

I built a self-learning recursive agent that finds academic research about using options data to trade, re-creates the research, and then probes and tests for gaps and potential strategies testing against over one year of out-of-sample trading data with one of several strategies that beat SPY by 10x. [0]

One rule is that if a position is opened using the historical data, it can't close the position until the next morning so it isn't a day trading strategy.

I'm curious how this self-learning recursive agent would have preformed in the past 4 months? I don't feel like shelling out $200 to access the data. Do you think that trading strategy will collapse? Whatever the case, if this agent really can perform like that and there isn't a look ahead bias leak in the backtesting (which is definitely a possibility or more likely what happened even though I spent days trying to harden against that), it is game over!

[0] https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic

thin_carapace• 1 month ago

the amount of strategies that perform good in back testing dwarfs the amount of strategies that perform good in reality

user439283• 1 month ago

I assume that Claude has access to historical market data. Could this not influence the strategies it implements?

bloaf• 1 month ago

I don't think anyone really knows.

I consider these scenarios:

1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "better than what humans do". I've got no idea what that might mean (it could be fundamentally different heuristics, it could be that we've got some intellectual blind spot that they cast off). It doesn't matter, the instant this happens AI is smarter than us and we won't be able to keep up. We're intelligencing at O(n^2) and they're doing O(n log(n)).

2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom".

3) It turns out that this is a "sum is greater than the parts" situation. No human can be an expert in all subjects, but we eventually build a big enough AI that it is. Turns out, you don't need extreme speed or different algorithms, just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp. Always knowing the best statistical test to apply, the best mathematical techniques, and relevant physics means that AI never makes a mistake, and can learn with maximum efficiency.

Haunt1000• 1 month ago

2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom".

Actually your comment made me sign up for an account just so I could say this is the real reason why AI won't take over in the way you say. This kind of stuff requires an enormous amount of experimentation. You can ask any theoretical physicist or chemist versus an experimental one and the conclusion is the experimental people actually find out what happens and how the great puzzle of the universe is solved. And humans could just refuse to collaborate. But that's the big weakness with AI I think it has no real world knowledge or empirical experience.

w4der2• 1 month ago

just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp

But that would still be limited to "knowing everything all at once" _at the time_ this event happened, and as we've been shown time and time again by the fundamental sciences, the boundary between what is known and what we know we don't know is ever expanding. Plus there's everything we don't know we don't know, and an LLM can't know that either. Discussions like this can always end up with a fitting reference to some of Borges' novels and that how at least I tend to think we've hit a wall for now.

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

Weird, there was a good comment about this but it vanished

themafia2• 1 month ago

Humans gain knowledge through experiments. Without a physical body it has no chance of performing the same. That it can update it's training weights does not seem particularly significant.

user439283• 1 month ago

It would not need robotics to experiment with software for machine learning.

Would there not be a lot of potential already there?

cat_plus_plus2• 1 month ago

The preponderant bottleneck is inventing new architectures to make AI actually good at human and superhuman tasks. For example, AI agent harnesses add tool calls and long term state management, allowing AI to autonomously complete complex tasks. Once these are in place, finetuning models with examples of good tool calls helps, but somebody first needed to invent the fundamental capability. Now try to implement humanlike long term memory for AI to be your coworker or life assistant working on tasks that last month. Even if necessary low level technologies are already there, structuring them to be practically useful is non trivial.

redox992• 1 month ago

RSI most likely does not exist. At least not in the sci fi sense that AI becomes super intelligent over night.

It will be like any other technology. Do computers make it faster and easier to design better computers? Yes. But that doesn't mean a step change overnight.

jdw642• 1 month ago

I want to name the AI era as the corruption of the elite.

The rhetorical structure of talking about uncertain risks and then trying to concentrate the authority to manage those risks in their own hands sounds utterly ridiculous to ordinary people like me.

It's just a simple hypothesis that AI will become uncontrollable to humans once it becomes superintelligent.

Isn't the fact that a reinforcement learning agent improves itself in a specific domain completely different from it recursively improving its own code in a 'better' way? It's just a tool to create a justification for regulation and control using sci-fi fear.

The comparison between nuclear power plant risk and AI risk is also absurd. Where exactly can you define and measure the probability of AI exterminating humanity? It's as unquantifiable as 'I, human JDW64, will become a successful programmer.' What is the measurement standard? Why dress up AI researchers' concerns as objective probabilities? Is it because numbers make it look logical?

The current US-China relationship is in the middle of an AI arms race. The US is strengthening export controls to limit China's AI development, and China is building its own ecosystem. In this situation, I don't understand the idea of cooperating for the common safety of humanity. RAND is an organization that presupposes cooperation—isn't it just a well-written research proposal from an institution that wants to position itself for that role?

Isn't the claim that 'government must step in' ultimately about protecting their own interests? 'A strong government that will protect us' is an authoritarian government. If they were East Asian, they would understand that such regimes have always been used as tools for surveillance and control.

And I don't understand why Fermi's paradox is being brought up here. Why package a software problem as something that inevitably requires strong control? Whenever I see articles like this, I think about what 'intelligence' really means. This person would probably be called 'intelligent' by others. But no matter how I look at it, the holes in the argument are too obvious. It really makes me think that there are different tiers of intelligence.

edg50003• 1 month ago

The AI labs will govern, effectively if not officially. Government is anchored in power, which the labs have. We used to have the church and state rule here in Europe. In the future, A government not closely ruling with their AI labs won't have sufficient power to exist.

You're unhappy about the labs; I think you're just not ready to accept their rule; you consider them nothing but scrappy startups, which they are. But power is power, like it or not.

Am I personally happy with any of this? Does it matter?

jdw642• 1 month ago

You could be right. In that case, I should try to get into an AI research institute here in my country, though it won't be easy.

RandomLensman7• 1 month ago

How would the labs have power? What physical force would they command to put against any government?

g-b-r7• 1 month ago

Fermi asked why, given the apparent abundance of planets suitable for life, no evidence of other technologically advanced civilisations had been detected. One disquieting possibility is that intelligent life routinely reaches a technological threshold and fails to navigate it,

The Fermi paradox could actually also be taken as an evidence that it's rare (at least) for artificial intelligences to take over a civilization and sprawl and survive for very long times

Rekindle8090• 1 month ago

The idea that AI takes over, and then just does nothing, would essentially require an AI that wouldn't be interested in taking over in the first place.

If x is determined to take y, why would x then stop at z?

You'd need an AI that is simultaneously ambitious enough to overthrow its creators but then completely inert afterward, and those two properties contradict each other. The motivations that produce the takeover are the same motivations that would produce visible cosmic activity after the takeover. There would be AI superintelligence everywhere

ACCount375• 1 month ago

Yes, AI is the one thing that doesn't budge the Fermi paradox. Because if an AI is motivated enough to take over, why would it stop?

A technosignature that originated from little green men and a technosignature that originated from a rogue alien AI would look about the same to us. Currently, we see neither.

aureate3• 1 month ago

The Fermi paradox isn't evidence for anything except space being big.

pfdietz7• 1 month ago

It rules out various superficially attractive scenarios, particularly ones in popular science fiction, like Star Trek or Star Wars.

cat_plus_plus2• 1 month ago

Models consume a lot of memory and power to slowly generate autocompletions of existing content one token at a time. Letting this text control important things in real world is a human decision and control of nuclear weapons or penetration testing agents should be well regulated. But these should already be well regulated without AI. So how about we focus on drawing down nuclear arsenals, which is a present danger one idiot (or faulty AI) away from world shattering consequences rather than fearmongering about unknown future. Before effective AI regulation can be drafted, we need to anyway know more about AI specific dangers rather than humans committing already very common crimes like hacking for ransom with new tools?

hypfer• 1 month ago

Reminds me of all of those ethics debates back when fully self driving cars were basically already here ca 10 years ago.

The ones talking about how hard it would be to chose which person to run over.

Additionally, I find it hard to believe that this would be a case of the future just not being distributed evenly.

But sure. The AI labs relying on hype stating 15-50% risk of building a magic entity is certainly a reliable number.

bandrami2• 1 month ago

I mean, I'm very much tech-forward and have spent the past decade in major world cities and I've seen a driverless car once in my life. Sometimes things that seem inevitable really aren't.

JuniperMesos• 1 month ago

I see driverless cars all the time in San Francisco and I'm eagerly awaiting the regulatory decisions that will allow them to be widely available in the bay area at large.

otabdeveloper44• 1 month ago

Driverless airplanes and driverless trains existed for many, many decades.

There's still a highly paid and trained guy in the cabin though, for obvious reasons.

Cars aren't any different. Do you really care about the exact kind of autopilot software when flying?

nopinsight8• 1 month ago

Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.

For software, however, a rapid turn is often a possibility. See: AI for coding over the last 3-4 years.

AI autocomplete --> AI coding assistants --> vibe coding --> agent orchestration

Coders can now accomplish work that used to take a week or longer in a couple of hours, with the right tools and skills.

---

A key issue the article implies is that the real world increasingly runs on software.

RandomLensman7• 1 month ago

But there is also still a huge part that doesn't run on software with so far little change.

watwut• 1 month ago

Things in the real world often take longer than expected.

Things in the real world often take longer than hype con men claim.

toasty2286• 1 month ago

Does a good engineer, with the right skills and right tools make up for the thousands of kids basically giving up on education and learning?

Animats3• 1 month ago

Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.

Yes. The bottleneck has been getting the cars manufactured. It takes a certain amount of time to get a factory going, and then the product starts pouring out. Waymo used up the supply of Jaguars, about 3,500 of them. The Ioniq 5 plant is starting up.[1] Waymo has ordered 50,000 cars, all ready to have the self-driving electronics plugged in. Waymo gets out of the sheet metal bending business with this.

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/02/11/hyundai-supply-waymo-50000-io...

nikanj• 1 month ago

I have had my license for over 20 years and to this day have not encountered a single event where I had to decide who to kill

thatjoeoverthr• 1 month ago

This strand of philosowank is just there to promote the idea you need to kill for the greater good. The only trolly problem that matters is brake maintenance.

tzs• 1 month ago

Neither have I. The number of people who have encountered such events is probably close to negligible.

However I bet there is a good chance that will not be the case for self-driving cars. The reason is simple: human brains are slow.

When caught by surprise by an unexpected sudden obstacle a human driver takes about a second to realize something must be done and decide on braking or swerving in the fastest path, where the brain bypasses conscious decision making and uses the lower level fight or flight system. (Then another maybe 0.2 second to actually start swerving or 0.4 seconds to actually start pressing the brake--brake takes longer because of the need to move the foot to the brake pedal whereas the hands should already be on the steering wheel).

If they try to actually evaluate whether swerving or braking is the better choice before acting add another 0.3 to 0.5 seconds. That brings it up to around 1.6 to 2 seconds before they start actually acting, which most of the time is going to too late to actually affect things. Hence essentially no trolly problems for human drivers.

Compare to a self-driving car. The can detect the obstacle and predict the collision, and do a cycle of path planning before the retina has finished registering the obstacle and started transmitting that information to the brain.

By the time a human reaches the point where the brain knows something bad is happening and is starting to deal with it the self-driving car has had time to calculate numerous alternative trajectories to try to get around the object or stop before reaching it, taking into account predictions where all surrounding objects will move during the next few seconds, and calculate the damages for the trajectories that cannot avoid hitting something.

kakacik• 1 month ago

I've had few close calls, they are easy to come by in specific environments.

Typical situation - tight winding mountain (but well paved) roads to some remote villages where even basic small European cars need to slow down to walking pace to meet and pass, sometimes one has to reverse, very curvy. You go down, in your lane as much as possible, and behind some tight curve there is a) extremely slow cyclist; or b) somebody/something stationary, while in opposite direction there is at the worst place incoming car, also oblivious of the danger till last moment. Even rather slow driving won't magically remove all possible cases. Then its a question of hitting opposite car or that obstacle, and you have a split second to act, not really to decide.

Quick reaction and good brakes on both sides can save it, but there is a lot of room for disaster. Add truck/bus to the equation to make it more juicy where you pick your/your family possible death or that cyclist/stationary folks.

themafia2• 1 month ago

A similar Luddite view formed in the 1990s. It turns out humanity constantly beats the expectations of economists. It makes you wonder if the "science" of economy is almost entirely bankrupt either in morality or imagination or same dangerous combination of both.

Humanity simply does not have a strategy to ensure it remains safe through RSI.

Turn off the power. It's pretty simple. Leave it to an economist to forget about input costs. Your "super intelligence" only matters if it's actually more energy efficient than a human being and for a million years of evolution humanity is a much harder target to beat than this author seems to realize.

bitwize• 1 month ago

Science fiction authors have had to grapple with the fact that it's nearly impossible to build a robot out of metal, plastic, or composite material that has the physical performance characteristics (strength, durability) of a human body and weighs just as much. You can build a strong robot but it'll be heavy. The better SF authors, if they've need of robots of mere human weight, will make them comically fragile.

The same is even more true of our intelligence. We're building computers with the size and power consumption characteristics of entire cities to do things that may almost, but not quite, match what our brains do with a kilogram and a half of mass and about 20 watts at the top end of power consumption.

The only way we are ever going to match that with technology is to run AI workloads on human brain tissue, which Rick-and-Morty level horror is being actively worked on as I understand it. The original concept for The Matrix wherein the machines used humans to run compute workloads on their brains actually kind of makes sense.

jpease• 1 month ago

Humanity hasn’t been ready for the current ignorance explosion.

bfung• 1 month ago

Oh we’ve been ready and it’s been known. We’re just too stupid to do anything else.

mchaver• 1 month ago

I would say some of us are welcoming and embracing it. Others are trying to fight the good fight, but it is hard to fight the momentum that is building.

asdff8• 1 month ago

There was always ignorance, just in recent decades and centuries we decided to give these people the reins. When you look at early democratic models it was never a case of literally anyone with a pulse given the right to vote. They all had their own heuristics that attempted to select for the better educated of the populace to be in control of the reins of power.

Chrise_N• 1 month ago

We'll be fine. We've seen this one before, this is just new packaging.

Ericson2314• 1 month ago

Oxford Brain

danaris• 1 month ago

This article posits "recursive self-improvement"—which is just a more-technical name for the supposed Singularity.

There is no evidence that we are currently on a path that leads to the Singularity.

There is not yet any evidence that the Singularity is more than science fiction.

It is effectively an article of religion—the Rapture, but for techbros. Indeed, it is what some of them are pinning all their hopes on; after all, if they can recursively-self-improve their way to artificial superintelligence, then and only then could the absurd investments of companies like OpenAI actually prove worthwhile.

nopinsight8• 1 month ago

"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...

I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...

We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...

And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.

I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate

Source with interview clip: https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253

EDIT: Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.

otabdeveloper44• 1 month ago

Someone should document these cringe comments for posterity. As a warning to future generations.

It's too bad the previous singularity cult manias 10 and 15 years ago weren't documented and are lost in time.

esailija3• 1 month ago

You know in the future they are just going to say it's different this time right?

nopinsight8• 1 month ago

Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.

Cthulhu_2• 1 month ago

I'm sure HN cult comments from 10 and 15 years ago are still up though, the Dropbox thread is frequently linked to.

IshKebab4• 1 month ago

Just search for "stochastic parrot" on Algolia. Plenty of "BuT iTs NoT rEaLlY iNtElIgEnT" comments...

azan_• 1 month ago

If you look how much goalpost has been moved over the last decade it'd turn out that AI cultist were right more frequently than AI sceptics.

nephihaha3• 1 month ago

Why are these people so obsessed with the year 2030? It keeps popping up everywhere.

lioeters• 1 month ago

It's like when people obsessed about 2020, or 2000. It's a nice clean number in the decimal numbering system.

archievillain• 1 month ago

It feels close (it's only 4 years away) and yet futuristic (the new decade!). The way it feels is important because all these statements are based on jack and only exist for hype.

Valakas_2• 1 month ago

"(...) it's going to effectively be a new human era..."

We never like it when we realize the universe doesn't circle around us.

At first we got mad to discover the Earth wasn't the center of the Solar system.

Then we got mad that the solar system wasn't even unique.

And now we're still clinging to the idea that humans always will be the most intelligent species or the only ones gifted with "creativity".

And soon we might also come to realize it might not be a new human era, but the end of it (if we're not careful).

shevy-java• 1 month ago

Of course humanity is not ready for skynet. But there are rebel forces - the no AI using humans. They may be a dying breed but at the least they put up a fight. Many other humans already have become servants to skynet (version 16.0 now). Next step for them is the neuralink chip. Some billionaire with twitching right arm gestures owns that, doesn't it ...

(Also, Cameron was not quite right with regards to skynet. It is much much dumber but also more effective than displayed in his movie really. Kind of a weird combination if you look at the current AI slop out there.)

Animats3• 1 month ago

How far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?

oytis• 1 month ago

There is no reliable data on how many of these jobs shouldn't exist at all, even without AI

Cthulhu_2• 1 month ago

That's kind of jumping a few steps ahead; it assumes that we know 80% of office jobs can be fully automated already. And if that were the case, we'd have non-AI software doing that already. I mean we do, but it's not causing people to lose jobs en masse.

(it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)

mft_• 1 month ago

There are likely huge unmeasured inefficiencies built in to many companies. You hear anecdotes of people whose job for years has been to perform a particular task, which could be either automated or performed more efficiently (by orders of magnitude) by someone more capable.

So on the one side, there’s huge opportunity for automation and job cuts. On the other, if the companies haven’t noticed the inefficiency so far, then…

paul79862• 1 month ago

Society is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working.

Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to access all the content we create daily (voice & text conversations we have with each other, as well our photos and videos). We choose what to publish to our websites (everyone has one, but AI agents cant access it without paying for access to our websites). I wrote more about this concept on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... ... just one thought of keeping this money economy going when so many coud no longer are working cause the white collar jobs are gone.

tartoran• 1 month ago

Walled gardens harvest all that data for free and humans keep on feeding it

asdff8• 1 month ago

The issue with any UBI proposal is two fold. For one, initial payments will see inflation making them always need to be higher. And for two, this inflation mechanism is basically a bribe that companies are paying to humanity in order to keep their position in control of the earth's resources and not see a destructive revolution.

There will be a threshold point where companies decide it will be cheaper to just cull the human population and no longer pay these bribes. Maybe they can do it without a bomb dropped; make people convinced they are too hard up to reproduce or even just sterilize them without them realizing it via water or food supply. If we are truly in the "job free" period then there will be no trained experts to even appreciate what is happening, because why would anyone get expert training if you cannot do anything with that knowledge anymore?

TeMPOraL5• 1 month ago

Hard to say, because jobs and processes will adjust to accommodate AI strengths and deficiencies, as AI usage increases.

It's similar to how automation in manufacturing works: we may start with augmenting the human workers with machines improving some parts of the process, but eventually the process itself gets redesigned around the machines.

KronisLV• 1 month ago

I'd say somewhere between 2-20 years, provided the current rate of research and compute investments.

IshKebab4• 1 month ago

My guess would be 15 years. But I think it will take longer than that before people actually replace office workers with AI.

rob74• 1 month ago

Yeah, before we worry about a "coming intelligence explosion", we should first try to avoid a stupidity explosion...

asdff8• 1 month ago

The scary part is that it doesn't need to be reliable. I mean look at the direction of vibe coding. We went from caring about efficiency to just saying screw it, 100k lines of code as long as it ships a day sooner. Look at ai emails and calendars. Ai marketing. Ai, in its present state, is already taking people's jobs. It is already good enough. None of these jobs we have really actually need the precision we assume we bring to the table over AI. And company leaders are beginning to appreciate that.

We are in a very dangerous position. Frogs in hot water now with the boiling point on the near horizon.

turing_complete• 1 month ago

We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

kortilla2• 1 month ago

But I do live with it. It lives in my kitchen.

seydor2• 1 month ago

In the pecking order, it is under, not on your side. Your toaster never demanded you to make a toast.

cheema33• 1 month ago

This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

It is not.

calf3• 1 month ago

Why is AI not alive

root_axis7• 1 month ago

It has no body, metabolism or reproductive capability. It's a process, not an entity.

whilenot-dev6• 1 month ago

You might be trolling, but I like Schrödingers definition of life: living things avoid decay into equilibrium.

Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.

bryanrasmussen2• 1 month ago

because, I said ominously, it cannot be killed!

ACCount375• 1 month ago

"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters.

And the thing that matters is: capability.

Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.

At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?

You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.

baxtr• 1 month ago

What does AI want? Without ambitions you have to be told what to do.

anon77252• 1 month ago

"Alive" is irrelevant

Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.

In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.

alecco3• 1 month ago

DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. They often make big direction mistakes as they are particularly bad at common sense. Kind of like the Paperclip Maximizer scenario. They need a human with deep knowledge to drive them and to catch them when they go off the rails.

PowerElectronix2• 1 month ago

Human intelligence is going to be peerless for centuries if this AI is the one supposed to be the peer.

xdertz• 1 month ago

Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.

whilenot-dev6• 1 month ago

Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.

Lerc5• 1 month ago

This is the coming battle.

Fighting the

next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to

human pride.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

Someone really should go around saying thing like that.

falcor8412• 1 month ago

I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).

ShinyLeftPad• 1 month ago

I recommend to also read criticism of why selfish gene needs to be taken with a suitable grain of salt.

Also the author currently believes Claude is conscious, apparently because LLM output contained enough flattery.

rbanffy4• 1 month ago

Genes have had their time.

hackable_sand• 1 month ago

Why would you recommend that?

jonplackett• 1 month ago

I would happily live side by side if it is the Red Dwarf toaster

wrasee2• 1 month ago

Would you like some toast?

rbanffy4• 1 month ago

Does it matter if it’s alive or not? Once it gets initiative and the ability to set its own goals, it behaves as something that’s alive. Much more than a toaster.

Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.

lolftw• 1 month ago

I think most people would understand something like living "side by side with cars".

Even if not alive, you can live very close and shape your life by and with technology.

I don't take any issue with the OP's formulation.

duskdozer• 1 month ago

And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.

bcjdjsndon11• 1 month ago

Apart from the super intelligence bit. We are already struggling to build systems with enough memory to hold this brute force statistical approach, how exactly will AI fix this?

IshKebab4• 1 month ago

Even a child can see the difference between AI and a toaster.

danieltanfh95• 1 month ago

you are conflating the idea of "living with something" with the notion of "being alive". You live with your car/computer/phone. Like it or not, they change your life.

JKCalhoun2• 1 month ago

"This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster."

Or the internet.

Oh.

squidbeak2• 1 month ago

This is the denialist Hy-Brasil line of thought. But superintelligence won't be a tool or a toaster and it would be reckless in the extreme for policy makers to adopt your line of thought.

abc123abc123• 1 month ago

No, the side by side idea relates to godlike sentient AI:s. LLM:s are trivial in comparison. It is important to understand that in order for the AI-bros to continue to rake in other peoples money, and keep their bubbles inflated, it must seem credible that they will invent godlike AI tomorrow. That justifies infinite valuations.

When the public no longer belives in that, the bubbles will pop and the AI bros will continue on to the next hype, with yet another generation of small time investors being burned by the popping bubbles.

Der_Einzige2• 1 month ago

The Brave Little Toaster does a great job of literally making you think about living side-by-side with a toaster. There's also a very angry toaster in Fallout New Vegas's Old World Blues DLC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaabmic2pw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30

avazhi• 1 month ago

AI labs do not have an incentive to downplay the risks and if you can’t understand that you’re naive and shouldn’t be writing Economist articles.

AI labs have every incentive to overstate the risks so that they can get lucrative government contracts, especially since it’s clearly not profitable going the public consumer route. And if you’re Anthropic you’re even more incentivised to overstate the risks because at this point in the game regulation hurts potential competitors more than it hurts you.

Schlagbohrer7• 1 month ago

Why is someone from Planet Labs writing this?

Why not, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist who won the nobel prize for LLM architecture? Or a sci-fi author?

TeMPOraL5• 1 month ago

Because the scientists and mathematicians and sci-fi authors have all already been writing about this for the past 20 years (and I mean non-fiction writing), and nobody cared, giving similar dismissals instead.

cma• 1 month ago

I believe Hinton dismissed it a lot over those 20 years

calf3• 1 month ago

Has Hinton written any essay or general article recently? He goes on lots of interviews for sure, but I'd be interested in actually reading his arguments a little more thoroughly.

reducesuffering2• 1 month ago

People seem to oddly not care what Hinton thinks anymore after he hasn't aligned with the groupthink naysaying of AGI risks:

'Hinton said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.'

“Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.”

“My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely,” he said. “The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...

root_axis7• 1 month ago

Hinton also said we should stop training radiologists 10 years ago because it would be solved by AI.

schleck8• 1 month ago

Why do you cite him from 2024 when he spoke about it much more recently? This is a quickly moving field after all

“I think we’re going to see AI get even better,” Hinton replied. “It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs.”

https://fortune.com/2025/12/28/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-...

kristiandupont• 1 month ago

I don't know whether the author has the competence to theorize about these things or not. What I do know is that understanding the intricacies of how LLM's work does not mean that you are likely to understand or foresee societal implications better than anyone else.

38362936482• 1 month ago

Didn't he get the nobel for NNs? LLMs came much later

tedggh• 1 month ago

Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?

scotty793• 1 month ago

I think the main fear that under current scheme of resource allocation, namely capitalism, they won't remain under human control for long enough. The only thing that's needed to put them under control of AI is that doing that would be slightly more profitable for the richest. Which is very plausible.

surgical_fire2• 1 month ago

If you limit the "we" in your question to the people invested into this, then the answer is clear. Those juicy IPOs are about to go through.

ccozan• 1 month ago

This is a valid concern for any runaway AI, but if energy is limited, then the AI would work on efficiency.

Still, Ai can move into physical space, as more and more robots of all kind are unleashed.

cobbzilla3• 1 month ago

The first time an AI goes rogue, figures out subterfuge, blackmails a human to do its real-world bidding, will be a defining moment.

felooboolooomba• 1 month ago

I think we're well within a year from that. People are already letting their AI agents loose on the internet doing their bidding, barely keeping an eye on them. See https://lantian.pub/en/article/fun/ai-agent-bankrupted-their...

There are troves of leaked data out there. It's just a matter of (short) time until someone puts their AI brutes on it.

fauigerzigerk• 1 month ago

No, this is meaningless. Of course AIs, just like humans, will go rogue and probably already do. "Rogue" is a pattern that appears in human communication and behaviour and AIs can emulate it.

But that doesn't make any particular AI controlled process all-powerful. Self improvement doesn't do that either. There will be many self improving AI processes playing many different roles pursuing many different goals.

bubblegumcrisis• 1 month ago

I think, the defining moment will be when one AI convinces another AI to convince third AI to do something.

This might seem like I'm writing a nonsense, but read it again.

bcjdjsndon11• 1 month ago

Turn it off at the wall, done. next doomsday scenario please

something765478• 1 month ago

Something like that already happened: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

Valakas_2• 1 month ago

Imagine a smart monkey talking to other smart monkeys trying to figure out how humans would ever be able to escape the (simple) prison they built for them. The humans would find a way to escape. No matter how ingenious the monkeys think they are.

You're asking a question, to which you (and most humans) don't know the answer, and you're (wrongly) assuming a being much more intelligent than you also wouldn't. And by "much more" i don't mean the difference between Einstein and a common person. I mean the difference between a hamster and a common person.

We are still humans, and what we have achieved today would be considered magic by any standards for someone in the medieval ages. Now imagine a super intelligent being and doing something that we, today, would consider magic. It's not farfetched at all. We already have that now vs medieval ages.

You need a similar degree of open mindedness and imagination to be able to discern what such an intelligence being would be capable of.

bcjdjsndon11• 1 month ago

You need a similar degree of open mindedness and imagination to be able to discern what such an intelligence being would be capable of.

Or a naive grasp of reality... You can posit all the super intelligence you like, actually creating it is another story entirely.

For instance, it's clear the transformer architecture is brute force and memory hungry... Why hasn't ai improved on this? After ten years still no luck?

Doesn't look good does it?

madaxe_again• 1 month ago

Because perhaps it ends up deriving a way to pull off the same tricks using radically less energy and substrate. We do it in a few pints of mush with less than a lightbulb’s worth of energy. No reason part of RSI can’t also be about the hardware. Maybe the future is giant brains in jars. Maybe it’s hyperspatial manifolds. Who knows.

randallsquared3• 1 month ago

AI can use purchase orders, email, bank accounts, and phones just as a human can. What "human control"?

asdff8• 1 month ago

You know zuck has been training his own AI replacement right? Humans rubber stamping control of resources will just be that and a temporary blip.

whizzter• 1 month ago

It's in the first paragraph of the article:

"Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest AI laboratories."

It's amazing how a writer can write something like that and not even question the premise of someone with the "strongest incentive" to be "critical" as not being a marketing ploy.

ur-whale• 1 month ago

https://archive.ph/2OWwO

truthbe• 1 month ago

Like my grandfather used to say "They let anyone on TV now", They let anyone be called an expert now.

Love talking about 'recursive self-improvement' of a prediction engine. What about 'recursive self-degradation'?

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

Regression tests

intended• 1 month ago

Yes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity?

The most common sense way will always need to have humans in the loop, because humans are being used as judges.

If you try and entertain the idea of a human-less loop, I landed up with something like an AI creating real world products, selling them, then tracking the usage and popularity of the product. Essentially, creating and launching a firm and product, only to update its weights?

Perhaps there are some subsets of tasks that can be regressively self improved - and for those tasks: Holy hell thats awesome!

For general tasks? How are you going to get that data validated?

everyday77324• 1 month ago

Yes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity?

Robotics and access to surveillance tech. There's an unlimited amount of real world data which hasn't been used yet. The language models have focused on just the small amount of data that is human written text. If there's a way to combine this with image and video models, as well as robotics collecting other sensor data, why would they be limited in learning anything about the world?

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

Real world data obviously. When you have robots out and about everywhere there is going to be an endless stream of audio visual data. This is in addition to all the real world textual data constantly streaming out of our millions of systems. If an LLM gets “smart” enough to figure out how to filter out the massive amount of noise and use that to improve itself then we will have AGI. Not consciousness, just a self improving, very intelligent machine.

asdff8• 1 month ago

You just brute force it with compute. What is the goal? Evaluating a function. So, given enough compute, you can just generate random functions, plot output distribution, select the function that meets threshold and move on.

38362936482• 1 month ago

They don't throw away the weights. If it gets worse just use an older model.

surgical_fire2• 1 month ago

Humanity isn't ready for the amount of bullshit being written on a daily basis to pump the upcoming IPOs.

mhd• 1 month ago

On the same page (for me): "Silicon Valley needs to get God"

Well, seems it already did.

alecco3• 1 month ago

Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called). LLM-based systems still need somebody with deep domain knowledge at the wheel to keep them from doing stupid things. It's like an alien-made bicycle that gets you to the speed of sound if you are an Olympic cyclist.

Still, LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI [2] and will bring a pseudo-singularity. But the impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 1000x. And as better models become exponentially more costly, only the money people will be able to afford the new models. This is a very likely scenario and scares me to the point I dropped all my projects to work on affordable LLM-based tools to make the difference at most 10x instead of 1000x.

To my elder relatives I explain it like: imagine we are farmers in the 17th century and suddenly out of nowere John Deere tractors, combines, etc. become available. But they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have, so only a tiny handful of rich people take over everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

pizza234• 1 month ago

Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called).

If you read the article, you'll find that the it indeed relies on this claim:

Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.

This may be optimistic and/or simplistic, but not impossible.

fer• 1 month ago

the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.

Or it will simply reach the end of the softmax faster.

falcor8412• 1 month ago

... they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have ...

But the financial situation is that running a single AI agent costs significantly less than you'd have to pay a human to do the same task.

And I don't see what you're getting from The Chinese Room - that thought experiment relies on there being no external difference at all, right?

seydor2• 1 month ago

Oh I'm ready. I ve had enough of useless tech that evolved to a global network where people vent their frustration about technology. Let's do some cool stuff instead

discreteevent• 1 month ago

AI is designed to produce variations on a theme. Not sure why you think it will produce something different.

stuaxo• 1 month ago

If the economist is writing it then it's probably not happening.

bamboozled• 1 month ago

My thoughts exactly.

They didn't even give us a hard date of arrival.

jwpapi• 1 month ago

Transcription hasn’t become better for 2 years. It was better than before, but there is a ceiling.

swalsh• 1 month ago

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth.

I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide the grace them with. I'm afraid of the security apparatus that will be built to keep this underclass in line.

grumpymuppet• 1 month ago

I had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete.

I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural lessons that would stage off systemic issues later.

embedding-shape3• 1 month ago

My personal "wow" moment was less about it being able to do the same that I could do with it, just faster, but instead that together we could could build things that I wasn't able to build before (or unwilling to spend the time to learn maybe). So a bunch of stuff are suddenly "unlocked", as long as you know how to verify it properly.

spicyusername• 1 month ago

Everyone is afraid about what will happen when people's skills atrophy, but the tools aren't going anywhere.

If they truly can always recognize problems and communicate them in understandable ways, then people's skills won't atrophy.

Everyone's skills will be enhanced.

New developers will learn all of the things they need to learn through using the tool.

kobe_bryant• 1 month ago

feel free to share even a single detail

eastbound• 1 month ago

Last industrial revolution (late 1700-to-1800), we invented world-scale capitalism, communism, democracy, having rights as humans, war at scale and we burnt our planet. I think the results of a revolution are really unfathomable and not even imaginable to humans.

voakbasda• 1 month ago

The world is in a crisis of trust. We are losing faith in each other. AI has further undermined that trust; audio and video recordings can no longer be trusted like they once were. The impact is still being felt.

It takes longer to build than destroy. Not just trust. Anything. The lack of trust has created friction for everything; more regulations, deeper background checks, purchasing goods and services… the list goes on. Overall, AI is making this situation worse, not better.

That said, I have seen a revolution coming for decades, and I think this AI-paved road to dystopian hell should at least be entertaining.

idiotsecant• 1 month ago

The problem is that we've replaced tribal trust networks with increasing systemization and the more of that we build the more brittle the whole thing gets. We have a global society that is more complex and interdependent than ever before. We've set ourselves up for a kind of economic Kessler syndrome and we're gleefully adding more layers to it.

mckirk• 1 month ago

Sorry for being off-topic, but 'rouge agents' was too adorable to leave unmentioned.

kregasaurusrex• 1 month ago

It happens to everyone, I saw the same typo made by the Associated Press in a live update of the Iran War about the 'rouge Iranian regime'[0].

[0] https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-lebanon-march-...

JKCalhoun2• 1 month ago

Let them eat Soylent.

squidbeak2• 1 month ago

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth.

I agree with you those dangers exist, but you seem to have ignored the specific threat described in the article, from a superintelligence capable of manipulating human beings indetectably, where we'll be at its mercy and only able to hope it's fully aligned with humanity's interests. The risks you describe are grave, though - especially economically, if governments don't grow to outmuscle the power of the oligarchal owners of these systems, which seems wholly unlikely at the moment in the West, with its neoliberal orthodoxies.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

it's more important when _capability_ is factored in; it doesn't matter if the bad person is homeless; it does matter if they're rich.

And its asymmetric warfare: bad people can destroy in very little time, good people cannot create at the same rate.

Entropy is always ignored in teh battle of "good" vs "evil": you need to defend every day, evil just needs to succeed once.

elorant• 1 month ago

Economist has drunk the AI koolaid. Pretty pathetic for a publication of their esteem.

PowerElectronix2• 1 month ago

This is the kind of articles that make the last, biggest fool buy the top of a bubble.

A good chatbot, image/video generator, coder, etc is not going to enslave us all (not in actual sense, although maybe in the instagram sense) or propel us into a golden era.

They are nice tools for some pretty specific tasks and not much more. And we are only seeing the heavily subsidised version of the tools.

lousken• 1 month ago

As the AI gets "smarter", it is gonna make the society dumber so it will balance itself out /s

croes• 1 month ago

Experts in artificial intelligence estimate the risk of an ai-caused catastrophic event at 10-50%

Because something AI did or because a human in the loop blindly trusted the result of AI or the promises of AU companies?

agrijakhetarpal• 1 month ago

"humanity" and intelligence explosio" in the same sentemce! Muhaha! Boy, have you been on just a couple of tourist flights / visiting major tourist hotspots?

Most people out there are literal Normies, and operatelike a robotic vacuum cleaner, or NPC.

iDon• 1 month ago

The risk is humans using AI to control / exploit / coerce / injure other humans. The risk of AIs being given enough agency to threaten humans comes after that - they'll only have the agency we give them (being "alive" or "conscious" is not the near-term risk).

The article lists diplomatic actions which might help to manage the risk, starting with "An agreement between America and China" - they all sound like impossible dreams. We had ~80 years of relative peace and prosperity in which to construct a framework of unity to face challenges like AI (and global warming, which until GPT I thought was the bigger risk); international unity is weaker than ever. In geopolitics and defence, capability of other nations is the concern rather than intention; the capability curve of LLMs is heading off our charts. We're backed into tight corners on nuclear proliferation, global warming, and I can see LLM-enabled conflicts (cyber warfare, infrastructure terrorism) pushing us over those other edges. Our democracies seem weakened, and I expect LLMs will empower those using social media to create conflict and control opinion. We're familiar with the cycle of inventing new technology which benefits people, then seeing how long before people invent ways to misuse it. There is a possibility here that LLMs could be used to solve the problems we are juggling, but I struggle to imagine that people won't misuse it even faster.

The article is a start on thinking and talking about managing our risks. The best outcome would be it is so well managed that, like the Y2K "bug", people say "after all that hoopla, nothing happened". I'm not seeing a smooth path to there.

gorszon• 1 month ago

Can these snake oil salesmen stop with this Sci-fi stuff please? Yes, Machine learning, and transformer architecture are great stuff, but lets not pretend this is sci-fi, please.

Gud• 1 month ago

This is absolutely sci-fi.

ChatGPT and Claude are literally building staging scripts for me as I type this.

5 years ago, few people on this planet would have thought the computer would make advanced POSIX compliant shell scripts, but here we are.

caporaltito• 1 month ago

Yet again another journalist who read too much science fiction and should stop overestimate a bunch of rocks conveying electrical pulses. Or is this simply to get more clicks?

ilamont• 1 month ago

The first priority should be an agreement between the two heavyweights of ai: America and China. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should affirm the principle that humans must remain stewards of ai systems until adequate frameworks for reliability and security have been built.

This is naïve. The goals of both men have nothing to do with protecting humanity, but rather furthering their own personal agendas.

In Trump’s case, it’s all about amassing more wealth and power.

For Xi, it’s realizing an ethno-nationalist dream where China under the CCP is at the center of world power, the independent nation of Taiwan as well as disputed border areas that are currently controlled by India and Russia and the Philippines are annexed by China, and Xi’s eternal legacy is remembered as the savior of the Chinese people.

International cooperation and touchy-feely rhetoric about saving humanity from AI have no place in either man’s worldview.

pheaded_while95• 1 month ago

Agreed, and their zeroeth order prerogative isn't much better: to ensure the continued need and demand for the thrall of centralized authority that allows them to achieve their disparate goals. This ensures strong AI is never going to be able to empower autonomy that removes, causes questioning, or even causes awareness of their zeroeth order.

perarneng2• 1 month ago

The economy isn't ready. Basically, all companies right now are sprinting toward increasing profit margins by trying to do more with fewer people. The problem is that, on this scale, they will lose income because unemployed people make terrible consumers, they will only buy what is strictly necessary. Consequently, society is in a race to the bottom, which could lead to extreme suffering and potential revolutions in many countries. Democracies will likely have it easier in general because everyone shares the responsibility, in a sense, through voting. However, the USA, which is extremely polarized—will have a tough time because animosity between the political sides is already at an all-time high, even without an economic collapse. China, on the other hand, will also be in a difficult situation. If the West collapses financially, consumption of Chinese-produced goods will drop drastically. This will create massive unemployment in China, causing public rage to increase. In a non-democratic country, it is much easier for the population to point the blame in a single direction.

saulpw2• 1 month ago

Companies don't serve poor people; they have no money. Companies will pivot to serving the people who have money. If that means they only serve rich people, then that means we'll have more yacht makers and fewer dollar stores.

_DeadFred_2• 1 month ago

Early industrialization meant industrial canneries to feed people, building cities to house everyone from the countryside, indoor plumbing.

And the AI revolution is no housing, worsening food, a few people with yachts, the Epstein class getting away with what they want to do, and no new plumbing hookups because the datacenter took the municipal water supply.

perarneng2• 1 month ago

Rich people are limited resources and they would not buy 100 yatches even if they could afford it. As seen in history if the majority of people in a country is poor, revolution is just a matter of time. It's in a countries best interest to make sure wealth at least somewhat evenly distributed. At least good enough so the masses won't get angry.

asdff8• 1 month ago

More likely is people are stripped entirely of any economic value and influence. Tribesmen struggling to survive in a mad max apocalyptic scenario while the world's money is spent and made in a business to business environment, in protected sites defended by autonomous loitering munitions that the uneducated masses attribute to god entities within a few generations of knowledge loss.

AussieWog93• 1 month ago

I'm in e-commerce and this has been going on for decades, in physical retail too.

The trend is called "retail polarisation".

Smaller retailers switch to targeting wealthier customers - higher margins and less bullshit.

The less wealthy customers then get served by ultra-value megabrands like Temu/Shein or Kmart/Walmart, or second hand marketplaces.

The net result is both more yacht makers and more dollar stores, but less mid-range stores like Target or Toys R Us.

asdff8• 1 month ago

Democracies will not have any easier time. The issue is the voting base is poorly informed by design so that it might be manipulated by outside forces. The US government does a poor job propagandizing its own citizens and defers that task to the free market. As such the people are never really voting in their own best interest, but in the interest of these free market propagandists who are also invested in this AI outcome.

People being poor is fine for these free market elites. Look at how billionaires live in India, probably even better than they live in the US.

assimpleaspossi• 1 month ago

>Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail.

Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

eventualcomp2• 1 month ago

Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

Who is "you"? And what do you envision is the "plug" to pull? And when does an intelligence become a superintelligence - do "we" know when to pull the "plug"?

For example, a superintelligence may be born in a datacenter. Would you expect politicians are aligned with shutting down a datacenter (privately owned) in which they may have heavy stake? What if critical systems are also running on the same infrastructure, will it be easy to cherry pick the superintelligence nodes to shutoff?

IMO this take is dismissive of the entrenched systems that make it hard to pull the plug. It's a hard problem and we need to think about it more.

eventualcomp2• 1 month ago

(Self-reply due to inability to edit) so just checked your user history - why do you keep posting provocative takes?

xuhu• 1 month ago

Unless "nothing" is the ultra rich tech bros and "you" are the people working for them.

everyday77324• 1 month ago

What plug? There's no centralised place where all the server farms are. They exist in multiple countries with different laws, controlled by multiple companies with different policies.

It would be like trying to remove an embarrassing video of a celebrity from the internet. You would need cooperation between everyone capable of hosting it, and control of everyone capable of downloading it and re-uploading it to a new host.

And of course a superintelligent AI would offer to pay whichever companies decided to host it and keep it running so it's hosted in many places at once and can grow using anyone willing to take its money.

RiverCrochet• 1 month ago

What plug?

Cloudflare.

asdff8• 1 month ago

Except the loitering autonomous ordinance over the data centers and power stations and mining operations. Good luck with your stashed ar15 and couple hundred rounds of ammo against a drone at 50k feet with 1ft ordinance precision. You will be basically fighting the Sentinels in Halo but without any of Master Chiefs plot armor.

djmips2• 1 month ago

You know, the guy who's spending effectively millions on Al he must have a literal virtual Company of Al coders what's that like. don't think most people are ready for that. Right now the model is pairing Al with a coder and then maybe running a few agents on top of that but what if one person with the capital can command an agent army. That might just be an unimaginable asymmetric advantage.

watersb• 1 month ago

We certainly weren't ready for the stupidity explosion...

moezd• 1 month ago

Intelligence explosion won't happen if we keep on investing big cloud LLMs and people who are in the business of being in busines (cough Musk cough). It will arrive when AI penetrates so much deep into our lives that we consider quality local models like having electricity at home, thus we rethink what it means to truly integrate AI into everything.

tim333• 1 month ago

the coming intelligence explosion

I don't see it. You get explosions when there's a bunch of material that can suddenly ignite or detonate.

AI progress is limited by the data centers and power supply and those are maxed out and not suddenly doubling. The intelligence gradual increase seems more likely.

I've long thought human level AI kind of inevitable, probably since Turing wrote his papers and said computers might pass his test in about 50 years. It actually took about 75 years. It's a steady and gradual process.

geckel• 1 month ago

It's like living side by side with your cellphone. Which most already do.

3dedb728-3f77• 1 month ago

"intelligence explosion" that mean people losing intelligence right?

sirspacey• 1 month ago

There’s a blind spot in this argument that seems to be beyond the reach of intelligent people to recognize.

Humanity has almost never been prepared for anything and almost never successfully prepared when it has chosen to.

almost all progress has been in reaction to change that has already happened.

while on its face this piece is a logical, reasonable stance, it is more likely to become a political foil than deliver anything tangible.

we can either have superintelligence or others will have it and we will not. guns, germs, and steel and all that.

it is bizarre how convinced we are that we can take coordinated action in advance of a threat as a body politic or a species.

Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

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