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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Technology
Kari Paul

Robot takeover? Not quite. Here’s what AI doomsday would look like

illustration of face being created from blue streams of digits
Artificial intelligence has amplified misinformation and disinformation, experts say. Photograph: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images

Alarm over artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Just this week, more than 300 industry leaders published a letter warning AI could lead to human extinction and should be considered with the seriousness of “pandemics and nuclear war”.

Terms like “AI doomsday” conjure up sci-fi imagery of a robot takeover, but what does such a scenario actually look like? The reality, experts say, could be more drawn out and less cinematic – not a nuclear bomb but a creeping deterioration of the foundational areas of society.

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