Leave it to a comedian with a national TV platform to express what troubles a lot of us, even if we hesitate to talk about it — for fear of being ridiculed as backward-looking worry warts.

“When the people who are making AI are scared of AI, it’s time to shut the whole thing down until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” Bill Maher declared on his HBO program, “Real Time With Bill Maher,” back in April.

He was responding to various speculations, in many cases erroneously attributed to leaders of the frontier artificial intelligence labs, assigning percentage likelihoods of AI models destroying humanity.

“We’re f—ing around with something that has a 20% chance of extinction. Twenty percent!” Maher continued. “Wasn’t that about what the odds were for Trump beating Hillary in 2016?”

Maher’s take was funny and thought-provoking, well worth watching. And it appeared, by the way, well before the notorious Hugging Face breach by autonomous AI agents developed by OpenAI, which famously escaped their “sandbox” in July.

Aside from the doom scenario some high-level insiders suggest of an unanticipated, civilization-ending “Oops” — that is, of the bots going rogue, doing what they’re not supposed to do — there is the question of the harm they do when they behave exactly as Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Sam Altman want them to.

Consider how AI chatbots insinuate themselves in the lives of users.

I can’t be the only one who finds the programmed-in sycophancy of chatbots distasteful. Their overly flattering, agreeable and subservient chatter brings a wince to the brow of an old-school grouch like me.........

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