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GWYNNE DYER: Could AI cause humans to become extinct?

Artificial intelligence companies have started raising the alarm about what AI could mean for us

Somebody was bound to sound the alarm eventually.

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In this case, it was a young British artificial intelligence researcher called Jacob Coxon, who quit his job at the AI company Anthropic to warn the world that “if we don’t slow down the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the next two years.”

“It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who are involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction,” Coxon said. And the floodgates opened.

On Sept. 8, Coxon posted his message on as many sites as possible (and also got 10 friends to retweet them), but he probably needn’t gone to all that trouble. The AI community was ready to hear that news, and four days later his former boss Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, tacitly agreed.

In a 3,800-word online essay entitled ‘We Must Pace the Frontier’, Amodei made the same argument in more temperate language.

“Addressing the risks requires pacing the rate of capabilities........

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