Worried about an AI apocalypse? Here’s how to think about the risk of doom

AI probably isn’t coming for you and probably isn’t going to look like this Shutterstock/Roman3dArt What are the chances that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity? Until recently, this wasn’t a question that most people worried about, yet in recent weeks, the discussion has broken through to the mainstream. You may have seen headlines saying there is a greater than 10 per cent chance that AI could kill all humans, but what does that actually mean? The honest answer is: very little. No one can produce a scientifically meaningful probability of an AI apocalypse – what people in AI circles call p(doom) – because it isn’t a scientific question. That is demonstrated p(doom) from 0 to more than 95 per cent – covering the full probability spectrum tells us nothing. Does that mean you shouldn’t worry about AI taking over the world? I can’t answer that question, because it depends on a number we have no reasonable way to derive. What I can do is compare it with other scenarios. Let’s start with an easy one: what is the chance of you losing the lottery? First, as with any question of probability, we have to make some assumptions. I will assume you have actually bought a ticket and that you are playing the UK National Lottery. The odds of winning any prize, from a free play up to the jackpot, are about 1 in 4.9, or 20.4 per cent. That means your odds of losing are 79.6 per cent, which is how the lottery makes money – most players lose. Let’s move to something more serious: what are your odds of dying in a road traffic collision? According to the World Health Organization, slightly more than 1 million people die in road traffic collisions each year, so the odds of this happening to you are around 1 million divided by 8 billion, or roughly 0.01 per cent. That is wrong, of course. The odds for you personally are highly dependent on many factors, including where you live – “more than 90% of road traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries”, says the WHO – but we can use the figure as a ballpark. What matters is that the odds are low enough that we don’t worry about it all the time, but high enough that we take some precautions to mitigate against the possibility, from wearing seatbelts to looking both ways when we cross the road.