How existential risk became the biggest meme in AI

The starkest assertion, signed by all those figures and many more, is a 22-word statement put out two weeks ago by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), an agenda-pushing research organization based in San Francisco. It proclaims: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." "If we were going for a Rorschach-test type of statement, we would have said'existential risk' because that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people," says CAIS director Dan Hendrycks. But they wanted to be clear: this was not about tanking the economy. "That's why we went with'risk of extinction' even though a lot of us are concerned with various other risks as well," says Hendrycks.