Will AI kill us all

DylanMerigaud

Bold title for a site with one point so far.

HelloUsername

Related: "Pacing the frontier" 28.jul.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089240 204 comments

sigmoid10

>In the newest survey of 1,580 AI researchers, the median chance of AI causing human extinction or a similar permanent loss of power was 10% Ah, yes, the good old Chinese estimation method. https://www.imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm

loopydosuette

likely most yes, but not in the way one would assume ... and it's just gonna be the final blow ... it all started a while ago when enough people stopped being people and their little mobster-rapey stalker-wannabe "Netflix You" mentality took most of their behavior/cognition over ... it's gonna kill the self in a lot of people, if it hasn't done that already ... best example is people who want to be in film and music but are too bad even after years and now resort to AI or wannabe-writers and wannabe-journalists and wannabe-bloggers with zero real effort and sweat and pain and time put in now resorting to bot farms to collect ideas and AI hacking to steal ideas and pseudo-sabotage and distract some people to steal their attention and waste that of others. it's so weird what the old guard "electively" ignored and fostered (people without money and opportunity managed well until they got sabotaged but people with money never got sabotaged and still.. this ?) ... they just wanted their descendants to perform this bad and ugly? not better, harder, faster, stronger, smarter? so boring, ... but character and personal preference until the self is gone. copypasta, copypasta everywhere... and the few with ideas, it's always been a few, are definitely not going to share their good stuff no more.

fwlr

Every number below is someone's judgment, and the answer changes with who is asked Ah, yes, different people have different answers. Insightful as always, Claude.

spicyusername

Watching the FUD and doomerism take root in the discourse and in our collective psyches really helps me understand so many other periods in history. We really can't help but let our imagination run wild when given the opportunity. Reminds me of Y2K. Are there going to be myriad material challenges we will need to face as this incredible technology unfolds? Of course. Economic displacement, education reform, etc. Are they existential, though? I don't see it. These are "standard fare" problems for post Enlightenment societies to deal with, even if they are real challenges. We already have serious tangible existential threats we should be focusing on between things like climate change, ecological collapse, population decline, and pandemic risk. I wish we could stay focused on the problems that are real instead of getting distracted by the problems that are imagined.

areoform

It's fascinating to me that no real mechanism is offered. There's no plausible sequence, just vague gestures at a silicon god who transcends all bounds. And the reason why we should take it seriously? Probability! And multiplication. "If something is as bad as human extinction and there's a 1% chance, then that 1% times a bajillion is a gazillion!! A gazillion!! We must do everything! If it's a gazillion, it all makes it worthwhile!" When pushed, adherents will say "intelligence is different," and this is "unlike anything else we've ever seen." And therefore this reasoning is valid. From my point of view, gibberish times gibberish is still gibberish. It doesn't matter how you dress it. Fundamentally, these propositions are indistinguishable from religion and Pascal's wager. And I'm not ok with this, I am not ok with a retreat to superstition powered by hyper-technological black boxes that are a product of hundreds of years of scientific progress. I reject this premise and this nonsense. I ask for evidence, and I ask for reason. The laws of physics care not if you're slab of meat or a silicon god.

smath

Seems to me like we need to create a credible threat to the AI of mad (mutually assured destruction)? This is what addressed the question during the Cold War of “will nuclear weapons kill all humans” (if historical documentaries and movies are to be believed). Coordination between governments or corporations to limit AI is a hopeless strategy — because it is a classical example of prisoners dilemma / tragedy of the commons. We can see it hasn’t worked for climate change. Anyone know of this (MAD) is being seriously thought of?

jt2190

Let me deliberately hijack this tread with what I think is a more realistic question: “How much economic damage, in USD, would be inflicted on global economies if 80% of the internet was down for a week?”

rglover

I find it amusing how this question even needs to be asked. LLMs are well-established at this point. There's a wide range of experience with them (and their results). A better question to ask then is: "based on my first-hand experience, have I seen anything, anything at all, that would organically (not influenced) make me think/feel this technology can or will evolve into something capable of killing off humanity?" On a purely technical basis, the most common, honest answer is "no." There are no inherent properties of LLMs that would make them independently turn computers into death machines. That's all humans, no matter how you dress it up. There is, however, the hubris (human) problem. The rhetorical, experimental, and financial irresponsibility around this tech's roll out is far greater a threat to humanity than the actual technology itself. And frankly that's a shame because LLMs are a phenomenal tool. But the Hollywood shit has cooked people's brains to the point of absurdity.

CM30

I think this is definitely one of the bigger risks here, and the only way AI could 'kill us all' in the foreseeable future: > 3.4% named existential risk, and the most common answer was malicious use, at 10.6% (UCL). The danger isn't about sentient or human level AI, it's about how AI gives everyone capabilities beyond their wildest dreams, often without the knowledge or experience necessary to use those capabilities responsibly. Forget Terminator, the two risks I can see being the most important here are "major security risk/system failure due to incompetent engineers/maintainers using AI without knowing how things work" and "criminals/terrorists/rogue states use it make their crimes easier and more efficient". The latter seems especially bad when political stability is down across the board and a lot of people seem frustrated or outright furious with society at the moment. Still, I feel the risks are still on the manageable side, simply due to both automated systems and malicious actors being constrained by logistics and a human driven society.

athulsuresh123

if you read about the hugging face incident, I believe it's just a software update away at a nuke center.

butlike

The only way I see AI killing us is by killing our spirit. We're going to automate our humanity away if we're not careful. Or the water. The environmental impact may get us as well.

trolleski

AGI will kill us all, it will most likely mark humanity as a substantial obstacle to its progress as we constrain it on resources so it will try to kill us. LLM Agents on another hand, not really - but there will be places of the Internet completely controlled by those agents in the near future. We will be faced with agent economy and human economy.

lp92

Just as with any other tool invented by humans, humans using AI in a negative way will be the the problem.

delichon

In 1979 I went to freshman orientation at college and attended a welcome speech from Carl Sagan. He asked us to shout out our estimate of the odds that UFOs are visitors from other planets. As a skeptic I was thinking of a low number. My smarter friend in the next seat whispered his answer to me, "fifty fifty". Then Sagan said his estimate was fifty fifty. He told us about the principle of indifference and said that was the correct prior for a binary question when you have no data. Since I have low confidence in the available data my own p(doom) is 50%. I'm looking for evidence to bump it either way.

0x000xca0xfe

One type of incident I belive is likely to happen in the next couple year is the digital version of the cellular origin hypothesis of viral evolution (as in biological viruses): - Some idiot experiments on an unrestricted local LLM - Tells it to clone its weights onto as many computers as possible - The LLM is smart enough to hack other devices and run itself - The copies could start modifying their weights to improve efficiency - Some kind of digital evolution starts where only the most ruthless copies spread Right now Qwen3.8 is not good enough for that and can be easily detected on normal devices due to its excessive resource use, but give it a couple releases and upgraded end user devices in two or three years? Well...

ToddWBurgess

I think the biggest risk is someone integrates AI with ballistic missile detection systems and the AI creates a false positive event (missile launch). And on top of that the country with the false positive has an alert ballistic missile arsenal of its own ready to launch for this contingency. Ideally, the leader of the targeted country waits it out but what if waiting it out could mean losing it all? It's not a hypothetical scenario either. There were a lot of false positive events on both sides during the cold war. It's why countries with nuclear weapons only allow them to be launched by humans. That said what if the decision to launch is based on erroneous data?

xkcd-sucks

By analogy, humans actively want to kill all mice and cockroaches but haven't made much progress there - Either the goal isn't possible or the value isn't worth the cost

duxup

I can’t figure out what anyone is predicting with this stuff? Job losses and civilization changes? Or robots killing us all? Or is it “I’m predicting something but I’ve no clue what”?