What Friday essay: some tech leaders think AI could outsmart us and wipe out humanity. I’m a professor of AI – and I’m not worried

In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted we were approaching the end of history.  He meant that similar liberal democratic values were taking hold in societies around the world.  How wrong could he have been?  Democracy today is clearly on the decline.  Despots and autocrats are on the rise.
 You might, however, be thinking Fukuyama was right all along.  But in a different way.  Perhaps we really are approaching the end of history.  As in, game over humanity.
 Now there are many ways it could all end.  A global pandemic.  A giant meteor (something perhaps the dinosaurs would appreciate).  Climate catastrophe.  But one end that is increasingly talked about is artificial intelligence (AI).  This is one of those potential disasters that, like climate change, appears to have slowly crept up on us but, many people now fear, might soon take us down.
 In 2022, wunderkind Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI – one of the fastest-growing companies in the history of capitalism – explained the pros and cons:
 I think the good case [around AI] is just so unbelievably good that you sound like a really crazy person to start talking about it.  The bad case – and I think this is important to say – is, like, lights out for all of us.In December 2024, Geoff Hinton, who is often called the “godfather of AI” and who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physics, estimated there was a “10% to 20%” chance AI could lead to human extinction within the next 30 years.  Those are pretty serious odds from someone who knows a lot about artificial intelligence.
 Altman and Hinton aren’t the first to worry about what happens when AI becomes smarter than us.  Take Alan Turing, who many consider to be the founder of the field of artificial intelligence.  Time magazine ranked Turing as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th century.  In my view, this is selling him short.  Turing is up there with Newton and Darwin – one of the greatest minds not of the last century, but of the last thousand years.In 1950, Turing wrote what is generally considered to be the first scientific paper about AI.  Just one year later, he made a prediction that haunts AI researchers like myself today.
 Once machines could learn from experience like humans, Turing predicted that “it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers […] At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
 When interviewed by LIFE magazine in 1970, another of the field’s founders, Marvin Minsky, predicted,
 Man’s limited mind may not be able to control such immense mentalities […] Once the computers get control, we might never get it back.  We would survive at their sufferance.  If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.
 So how could machines come to take control?  How worried should we be?  And what can we do to stop this?
 Irving Good, a mathematician who worked alongside Turing at Bletchley Park during World War II, predicted how.  Good called it the “intelligence explosion”.  This is the point where machines become smart enough to start improving themselves.
 This is now more popularly called the “singularity”.  Good predicted the singularity would create a super intelligent machine.  Somewhat ominously he suggested this would be “the last invention that man need ever make”.
 When might AI outsmart us?
 When exactly machine intelligence might surpass human intelligence is very uncertain.  But, given recent progress in large language models like ChatGPT, many people are concerned it could be very soon.  And to add salt to the wound, we might even be hastening this process.
 What surprises me most about the development of AI today is the speed and scale of change.  Nearly US$1 billion is being invested in artificial intelligence every day by companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon.  That’s around one quarter of the world’s total research and development (R&D) budget.
 We’ve never made such massive bets before on a single technology.  As a consequence, many people’s timelines for when machines match, and shortly after exceed, human intelligence are shrinking rapidly.
 Elon Musk has predicted that machines will outsmart us by 2025 or 2026.  Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI competitor Anthropic, suggested that “we’ll get there in 2026 or 2027”.  Shane Legg, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, predicted 2028; while Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, put the date as 2029.  These predictions are all very near for such a portentous event.