‘Rogue’ software set to take over? Please. I know the banal truth

September 30, 2026 — 7:00pm

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There’s a heightened sense of alarm and even despair over the grim warnings that artificial intelligence will not only take our jobs but become sentient, turn on its creators and threaten humanity.

Don’t buy the snake-oil. AI isn’t going to replace human intellect, become conscious, or cause human extinction.

Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, whose computer chips are used in data centres around the world, declared this month that “artificial general intelligence has arrived”. It was a preposterous claim, implying that OpenAI’s release of a new model known as GPT-6 Astra had achieved human- or beyond-human ability to learn, reason, and apply knowledge across multiple fields. He added that the model had been trained on 100,000 Nvidia chips, boosting his company’s perceived value. He then announced the largest share buyback in history, 36 per cent more than the previous record US buyback (Apple, 2024).

The hype isn’t new. In 2019, Tesla’s Elon Musk claimed that within two years, there would be full self-driving cars that would “find you in a parking lot, pick you up and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention”. It would be “safe for somebody to essentially fall asleep and wake up at their destination”. The reality is that driver inattention and Tesla’s shortcomings have resulted in “hundreds of injuries and dozens of deaths”. A study claimed that Waymo’s driverless vehicles had fewer crashes than humans; in fact, the sample included only crashes serious enough to report to police, not all accidents, and the cars frequently call Waymo’s six call-centres, where about 70 humans are available at any given time. Their cars are still driver-assisted.

Rosy predictions have been made for 60 years, and not just by tech bosses who........

© Brisbane Times