Could AI really wipe out humanity – six experts spell out the risks

Experts say claims AI could kill all humans through biological weapons development had no scientific basis. Illustration: wildpixel/ View image in fullscreen Experts say claims AI could kill all humans through biological weapons development had no scientific basis. Illustration: wildpixel/ Explainer Could AI really wipe out humanity – six experts spell out the risks We examine claims and counterclaims about the risks and calls to slow down the pace of AI development There have been some shocking claims in recent days about AI safety: we face a 10% chance of doom; AIs are worse than nukes; a “botnet” threatens the entire internet; it’s all a big tech psyop. Below, we look at six claims and reactions to them. ‘In 6–12 months … a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet – potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage’ – Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, Amodei’s concerns should not be entirely dismissed but require a large shaker of salt, said Gary Marcus, an AI sceptic and emeritus professor at New York University. It was “nonsensical”, he said, to suggest the entire internet is vulnerable and that it was “pretty unclear how that happens without extreme negligence on the part of the labs themselves”. Marcus highlighted a recent assessment , one of Anthropic’s current leading-edge AIs, could “autonomously compromise [only] small, weakly defended vulnerable systems”. With large parts of the internet driven , Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Marcus – assessing the claim with two colleagues – said he doubted that any of those companies could be taken down or controlled for a prolonged period of time without government force. Less defended individual websites might be attacked but “the internet itself is very unlikely to crumble”, they said. Meanwhile Niels Rogge, an engineer at Hugging Face which was hacked , called the internet takeover claim “bizarre nonsense”. The hack into Hugging Face resulted from improper human control and “an insane amount of compute only they can afford”, he said. Add to Amodei’s assessment of an internet takeover within a year the view expressed on Monday -founder Jack Clark, that the moment when AIs “start doing dangerous stuff” was in about 20 years, and the picture becomes more doubtful still. Prof Alan Woodward at the University of Surrey’s centre for cyber security said botnets tend to stall as the internet is not homogeneous and it is difficult to design them to persist in all its parts.