How might artificial intelligence kill us all? The Telegraph asks the big question

[Henry]

The Telegraph has run a piece under the blunt headline How artificial intelligence might kill us all. A year or two ago that would have sounded like a science fiction pitch. Now it feels like a fair question for a mainstream newspaper, given what has been happening in AI over the past few weeks. The fact that serious papers are running this kind of explainer says a lot about where the debate has moved

Just look at this month alone. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and people from inside OpenAI and Anthropic have warned of a possible intelligence explosion. Bill Gates said AI is powerful enough to drive events that could cause a billion deaths. Anthropic's IPO prospectus lists existential risk to humanity as a risk factor, and OpenAI has just cancelled the release of a model because it failed safety checks

The scenarios usually discussed by experts fall into a few groups. There is misuse, where bad actors use AI to design biological weapons or launch devastating cyber attacks. There is loss of control, where increasingly capable systems pursue goals in ways humans cannot stop. And there are slower risks, like societies handing so much decision making to AI that humans gradually lose the ability to steer things

Plenty of people think the doom talk is overblown. Many researchers argue that current systems are nowhere near capable of anything like that, and that focusing on extinction distracts from real harms happening now, like bias, surveillance and job losses. Others point out that some of the loudest warnings come from companies that also benefit from making their technology sound incredibly powerful

Where do you sit on this? Do you think the existential risk warnings are justified, exaggerated or somewhere in between? And if there is a real risk, what should be done about it?

How Artificial Intelligence Might Kill Us Allwww.telegraph.co.uk