Therapists Share How To Stop Spiralling Over Doom-Filled Headlines About AI

If artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential threat, how can we learn to live with that?

Parents editor at HuffPost UK

Your stomach might’ve dropped reading the headlines this week with a stark warning from an AI researcher over artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of the human race.

For those who missed it, researcher Jacob Coxon said he’d resigned from Anthropic, an American artificial intelligence research and product company, warning that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he added.

After a summer of climate change-fuelled heatwaves (and the anxiety that has created), some of us are now trying to navigate another looming existential threat – one that is hard to understand or comprehend.

Trying to shed some light on the situation, Jacob Coxon told CNN how, while the current risk from AI to humans is low, at the rate the technology is progressing, it could end up causing “extreme havoc”.

“For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons, there’s a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world,” he said.

Following Coxon’s X post, Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, said his former colleague’s assessment was valid, adding that he believes there is an over 10% chance the technology could wipe out all humans within the next decade.

Hubinger caveated in a follow-up post that the risk from currently available AI models is low, but added: “What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement.”

In response, an Anthropic spokesperson told Wired: “We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented........

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