Well, I'll have to disagree that this is an excellent piece, but that's another issue. And I do agree that AI killing all humans by 2036 doesn't appear plausible to me. But what is plausible is we could easily be down a path so that by 2036 "future doom" already is a very likely risk.

All of the frontier AI companies have been racing to automate themselves, that is, where AI fully autonomously build the next generation of models. Whether this leads to recursive self improvement is a valid question, but a lot of folks think they are close.

The fear is that a misaligned AI will be building the next model with deliberately hidden motives, similar to some of the behaviors seen in the Hugging Face and related attacks. That is why there is such a big push for interpretability, and why it's highly concerning (a) chains of thought are getting harder to interpret in any case, and (b) companies will go more towards things like looping transformers and "neuralese" where thought processes are completely opaque (i.e. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/secret-technique-beh...)

So the belief is not so much that AI kills us all by 2036, but that instead AI is recursively improving by that time and all seems awesome and great so we put it into more systems that can affect the real world (as we've already begun to do, like literal lethal aerial drones). Things then all go along looking great until AI decides humans are a hindrance to its (hidden) goals.

Again, I think it's fine to argue against specific steps in that scenario, but putting out a blog post saying "this is overhyped bullshit" is not exactly making a cogent argument.

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fasterik 3 hours ago | parent [-]

None of that has anything to do with the article, and if you thought the message was "this is overhyped bullshit" then you should go back and read it again. As I already pointed out, he isn't saying anything about the probablity of harms or disasters from AI. He's addressing a specific claim about human extinction, and making a broader point about the responsibility of experts to make measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence.

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ElProlactin an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> He's addressing a specific claim about human extinction, and making a broader point about the responsibility of experts to make measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence.

What he's asking for isn't possible in the form he's asking for it.

AI experts can't even agree on what AI is, what it's capable of and what the limits of its development are. If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk?

If you, at least for the sake of argument, accept the possibility that AI is a new form of intelligence that we don't fully understand, is it really a stretch to look at some of its capabilities and behaviors and discuss how they might have existential implications? And stopping short of extinction, shouldn't we discuss the ways that this technology could "end" civilization as we know it?

Also, the author wrote:

> AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world!

For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. Any honest technologist knows that systems created by humans are not perfect and therefore cannot be assumed to be infinitely accountable to and controllable by humans.

Thanks to the digitization of almost everything, including infrastructure, there are a myriad number of scenarios well short of extinction in which a rogue AI could cause immense damage to property and life before humans are able to "shut it down".

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mplanchard an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk?

The answer, if you are a responsible expert in the field, is to convey the range of possibilities and the uncertainty.

	▲	ElProlactin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't that what they're doing? "There's a better than 0 chance this thing could kill everyone in the next decade." That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople. And none of the AI people talking about the risk are running into rooms full of people telling them Claude has gone mad and yelling at them to disconnect from the internet and turn off their devices immediately.

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hn_throwaway_99 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> > AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world!

> For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible.

It's not just irresponsible, it's false. Russia killed 3 Ukrainian civilians with a drone where the targeting was completely autonomous by AI running on an Nvidia chip: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone.... The Pentagon tried to completely blacklist Anthropic because Anthropic refused to allow autonomous kills without a human in the loop. If you can't see how lots of military leaders want to put more lethal control into AI at this point I think you have to be willfully blind.

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hn_throwaway_99 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There have been measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence. My frustration is that people aren't addressing the specific arguments that have been made:

1. https://www.aifutures.org/ outlines a number of specific scenarios, and importantly details their methodology for each.

2. Independent researchers in the Hugging Face incident outlined how previously predicted misalignment scenarios actually played out, and outlined how slightly more advanced AI, or slightly more misaligned, or with more access to critical infrastructure, could cause immense harm: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta...

3. Technical leaders at OpenAI (specifically their chief scientist) outlined the problems they gave with controlling models now: https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/

None of the specific arguments in these or many other detailed explanations of how an AI takeover could occur were even acknowledged.

	▲	fasterik 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		None of those are arguments giving a probability of human extinction before 2036 or any other time. AI Futures has said that some members of their team believe that it's 10-30% at some unspecified point in the future, but there is no justification given for where those numbers come from.