Opinion

Imagine that as you are boarding an airplane, half the engineers who built the plane tell you there is a 10 percent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else onboard. In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future A.I. risk. Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10 percent or greater chance of human extinction (or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment) from future AI systems. Technology companies building today's large language models are caught in a race to put all of humanity on that plane. Biotech labs cannot release new viruses into the public sphere in order to impress shareholders with their wizardry.