> 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.