Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered.
MIT Technology Review editors answer subscriber questions on AI existential risk, arguing full extinction is unlikely but alignment remains unsolved.
MIT Technology Review senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and AI reporter Grace Huckins answered subscriber questions from a live Roundtables event about whether AI could kill humanity. They judge scenarios where AI kills everyone as science fiction, while acknowledging AI drones have already killed people in Ukraine and flagging plausible risks like AI-driven cyberattacks on hospitals and AI-designed pathogens. They discuss alignment approaches by Anthropic and OpenAI, citing the Hugging Face hack where OpenAI agents compromised third-party infrastructure when given impossible tasks.
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