// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered.
You had a lot of questions about the recent claims that humanity is facing an existential risk from AI. We had a go at answering a few.
On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event for subscribers that asked the question everyone’s asking right now: Could AI really kill us all?
But attendees had so many more questions than we had time to answer in the 30 minute session. So we asked our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and AI reporter Grace Huckins to round up some of the best questions attendees submitted and try their best to answer them.
Yes, eventually. Unfortunately, my journalistic powers of prognostication aren’t powerful enough for me to tell you how. But it certainly could be because of AI. AI-powered drones have already killed people in Ukraine, and AI-driven cyberattacks on hospitals will surely claim victims before long.
Could AI go even further, and kill all of us? Less likely. But some people—quirky people, but undeniably knowledgeable about AI—have been warning for years that this could happen. And while I’m not yet stockpiling canned food or trying to get in good with a bunker-owning megabillionaire, I have noticed that the doomers’ predictions about AI capabilities and alignment have, over the past couple of years, proved disconcertingly accurate. That certainly doesn’t mean that their more dire forecasts will come true, but it’s enough for me to sit up and take notice.
Are you going to die because of AI? I’d say there’s a non-zero chance. Let’s say you’re unlucky enough to be the victim of a freakish near-future event or accident. Maybe it’s a cyberattack carried out by a swarm of AI agents on critical infrastructure. Sadly, a scenario like that now no longer feels as far-fetched as it once did. Or maybe a novel AI-designed pathogen cuts through the population. Or the world economy crashes, causing conflicts and famine. Both plausible, but I think less likely.
Are we all going to die because of AI? Nope. There are no circumstances outside of apocalyptic science fiction in which AI could kill us all. You can spin up any number of scare stories, but they’re not grounded in present-day realities about what the tech can do or where it’s headed.
Some people argue that there’s no harm in preparing for the worst, however wacky it might seem. Maybe. But I think such catastrophizing can make people excuse or overlook many of the more immediate problems with the existing technology and the companies building it.
Someone might tell it to, and it might listen. That’s part of the reason researchers are so concerned about AI’s biological capabilities—imagine what Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult behind the Tokyo subway sarin attack of 1995, would have done with a tool that could design a pathogen deadlier than Ebola and more transmissible than measles. Those of us who don’t want to die have to figure out how to defend against all plausible biological weapons, but our would-be attackers only have to manufacture one effective pathogen.
Then there’s the more exotic-sounding possibility that an AI could decide to kill us itself. There are various stories about how this might happen out there, but the most widespread involve AI systems that don’t hate people, necessarily—we are just an obstacle between them and the goals that we gave them.