Snake Oil, Artificial Intelligence, And The Probability Of Death

The last week has seen some of the most important people in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry declare to the world that the technology has become so far advanced that there is a 10 percent chance we may actually experience Terminator 2: Judgment Day — in short, there’s a one-in-ten shot that Skynet is self-aware.

This was the hype that permeated mainstream media, Silicon Valley industry outlets, Capitol Hill, and even the White House. The thrust of the argument is that we must slow down and regulate AI to avert disaster. However, the reaction from the AI industry and lawmakers in Washington, D.C., raises the question of whether to take the claims of Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and even Elon Musk at face value. And yes, maybe we should. But then again, maybe AI and the imminent death of humanity is really just one of the oldest scams in the book.

At the core, AI and the future of humanity could — at a high level — take four paths. The first is one in which much ink has been spilled. Namely, if we continue to train and develop what is believed to be artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents at a rampant pace, with few safeguards, and a lack of focus on alignment — think ethical and moral frameworks — then we’ll end up with something like Skynet or HAL 9000, and it will kill us all. And certainly, if Dario, Altman, and the rest have achieved AGI and built what Dune author Frank Herbert termed “thinking machines,” then alignment and regulation should be our top priorities.

This position has inspired, among some, a bleak view of the future should humanity fail to properly regulate what — I’m told — they believe to be either already conscious or near-conscious technology. To that end, I spoke with Samuel Hammond — the director of Artificial Intelligence Policy and chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) — who warned me that we have about 18 months to figure this out. Hammond left me with an impression — echoed by other experts — that there are developments in the AI industry being kept behind closed doors, unknown to the public, that point to an imminent technological leap.