For those of us steeped in dystopian movies, it's easy to start thinking about building a bunker after the latest news. A researcher resigned from the Artificial Intelligence firm Anthropic earlier this month and then posted on X: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." One of his co-workers said the chance robots will destroy the human race is north of 10 percent. I'm not sure how he calculated those odds, but I'm not liking them.
In response, the godfather of AI, Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, argued, per CNBC, that AI systems "already have the necessary hacking skills and the powers of persuasion to be turned against human interests in seriously harmful ways." He added in a blog: "These systems are trained on human approval." That can lead to tragic results "because the model confirms and amplifies whatever false belief or raw emotion the person brought to it."
