Ex–Google engineer Nate Soares hasn’t added to his 401(k) in a decade because he’s an ‘AI kills all humans guy’

One of the best-known names in AI safety says he no longer saves for retirement, because he lives with the belief that AI will probably kill everyone before we even get to retirement age.

Nate Soares, a former Google engineer who is now president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), still has the 401(k) he opened at Google, but he just hasn’t put money into it in about 10 years.

“I do not save for retirement right now,” Soares recently said on The Most Interesting Thing in AI, a podcast hosted by Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. “I have a 401(k) from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed for a decade.”

Thompson asked whether he thought there was more than a 50% chance humans won’t be around in 10 years.

“More than 50% that we don’t have a decade at this point is how it looks to me,” Soares responded.

Soares left Google in 2014 to join MIRI, a Berkeley nonprofit that has spent years studying how to make advanced AI behave as intended. He and MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky laid out their case in the........

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