Shortly after the world tilted on its axis with the release of ChatGPT, folks in the tech community started asking each other: What is your p(doom)? That’s nerd-speak for, what do you think is the probability that AI will destroy humanity? There was Eliezer Yudkowsky warning women not to date men who didn’t think the odds were greater than 80%, as he believes. AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton estimating 10-20%—enough to get both to shift their careers from helping to build AI to helping to protect against it. And then another AI pioneer, Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, pooh-poohing concerns and putting the risk at less than .01%—“below the chances of an asteroid hitting the earth.” According to LeCun, current AI is dumber than a cat.
The numbers are, of course, meaningless. They just stand in for wildly different imagined futures in which humans either manage or fail to maintain control over how AI behaves as it grows in capabilities. The true doomers see us inevitably losing an evolutionary race with a new species: AI “wakes up” one day with the goal of destroying humanity because it can and we’re slow, stupid, and irrelevant. Big digital brains take over from us puny biological brains just like we took over the entire planet, destroying or dominating all other species. The pooh-poohers say, Look, we are building this stuff, and we won’t build and certainly won’t deploy something that could harm us.
