The AI Safety Debate Has Lost the Plot. The risk of nuclear catastrophe is real, as is the fallout of the China-US domination game (hi there, spies). But no need to panic about Skynet. In early fall, I felt my anxiety rising from its usual baseline. Was it September's back-to-school energy? Nope, I realized with annoyance: It was AI--again. Only this time, instead of its purveyors warning of massive job displacement, they were foretelling mass extinction. Who needs jobs when we're all dead? Curiosity soon replaced my knee-jerk irritation. The summer of 2026 was a clear turning point in the AI narrative. Less than four years after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI software broke out of a supposedly safe test environment and hacked into a major open-source platform, Hugging Face . These bits of software-- AI agents --were assigned human attributes: They had "gone rogue," displayed "bad behavior," "cheated."

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Mandel is a senior editor at TIME. This year, the U.N. issued its landmark Global Water Bankruptcy report, authored by Kaveh Madani, who is known for coining the concept of "water bankruptcy."

'What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted' Jeanette Winterson at home in east London. 'What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted' Jeanette Winterson at home in east London. 'There is no inevitable dystopia': Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity The author believes we are at a turning point as a species - and even in the shadow of big tech it's up to us how we want to proceed'I am a storyteller by trade," writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. "And I know everything we do is a fiction until it's a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying - or of returning." She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years - her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor's travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots. When we meet, Winterson is just back from China, where, she tells me, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fictionalised account of her childhood, has sold more than a million copies in the past six years; more than 200,000 mostly young women tried to come to see her speak. She thinks this is because, in a world of long work hours and looming AI-engendered precarity, this fictionalised account of her own escape from an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves. She has since written 13 novels for adults, as well as nonfiction, short stories, children's books and screenplays. Now she wants to persuade the production company Goalhanger to give her a podcast. "I want to do one called The Rest is Human," she says, sitting at a bare wooden table in her home, a Georgian set of rooms above a shop - which she also owns - in Spitalfields, east London. "To see what we retain for ourselves in this absolute scramble to outsource everything we thought we were." Winterson: 'We've got a market that doesn't really know what education is for.' Because we are, she argues, at a turning point in our story as a species. Until the Industrial Revolution, change was all about "Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming", but then we "massively intervened.

Anthropic's blockbuster share listing - 5 surprising things we now know Image caption, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has become a key figure in the current AI era. Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic just released the required paperwork ahead of its long-anticipated debut on the US stock market. The 335-page document included fresh details of how the Claude chatbot owner makes money, what it spends that money on and who it is controlled by. Anthropic also detailed the risks posed by its technology, including how it could take human lives. That information sat alongside the many purported benefits of the technology.

The Dell Laptop Buying Guide UK: Which Dell Laptop Should You Buy? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Its models could transform work as we know it, cure disease, and/or destroy humanity. No, Anthropic's IPO filing is not like the others. I don't make a habit of perusing the paperwork from tech companies -- or any companies, really-looking to go public.

Anthropic thinks "closing the loop" is the best path to AI triumph--and a recipe for "existential" threats to humanity. Anthropic has officially filed the prospectus for its initial public offering, which means the AI lab has put all kinds of formerly private information on display. While the prospectus contains the eye-popping revenue--and even larger expenditures--you might expect, the biggest section of the filing by far is given over to "risk factors," which are all the things that could squash Anthropic's big plans. While much has been made about the extent to which AI represents an existential threat to humankind, the specific mechanisms by which it could bring about that destruction are largely opaque. If nothing else, the 94 pages that Anthropic's prospectus devotes to risk factors make clear both where it sees the danger coming from, and the ways in which its researchers are running toward it in order to win the AI arms race.

'Like the Trump administration, the tech overlords have proceeded on the assumption they can ignore or override the will of the people.' 'Like the Trump administration, the tech overlords have proceeded on the assumption they can ignore or override the will of the people.' The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP's alignment with tech overlords over the public they're meant to serve "The world should accept some bad things happening," Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, "for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency." Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it's incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle. I've been a fan of the film Terminator 2 forever, the one where a badass female protagonist leads the action-movie-style spectacular destruction of Skynet, the massive computer system that will otherwise go rogue and pit itself and a plethora of advanced weapons against the human race.

Anthropic says it will commit 5% of its shares to'public benefit fund' Artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic says it will commit 5% of its shares to a fund that will make donations for the public good. The announcement comes as Anthropic lays the ground for a potential blockbuster stock market listing that could value the firm at more than $1tn (£750bn). The AI industry has come under intense scrutiny recently over safety concerns and fears about its impact on society and the economy. Anthropic reportedly said in its initial public offering (IPO) filing that AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. Anthropic said its proposed fund could support nonprofit organisations, and efforts to address AI's impact on the jobs market.

Americans can rest easy - for the moment, at least. The fine folks at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have thwarted a major national security threat . On October 9, the FBI arrested 35-year-old engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi citizen employed at the California-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, and a firm that describes its mission as ensuring that "artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". A press release from the United States Department of Justice said that Alfozan was accused of installing a "surreptitious audio recording device" in an executive conference room at the OpenAI offices in San Francisco. The statement quoted Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton's assessment that "this serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative".

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