A former Google AI expert is so convinced artificial intelligence will wipe out humanity that he’s stopped saving for retirement.
Machine learning researcher Nate Soares, who has worked as a software engineer at Google and Microsoft, said in a recent podcast episode with the CEO of The Atlantic that AI is more likely than not to wipe out humanity within the next decade.
Soares pegs the possibility of AI-driven extinction at over 50 percent over the next ten years.
“I guess right now it looks like we probably don’t have a decade on the clock,” Soares continued, adding that it’s “more than 50% that we don’t have a decade at this point.”
A decade ago, he said he stopped putting money toward his retirement, driven by this belief.
“I do not save for retirement now,” Soares said. “I have a 401K from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed to it for like a decade.”
Soares is currently the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit known for promoting “AI doomerism,” which is the belief that developing superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction.
Soares compared everyday living with this fear of AI extinction to the fear of living with nuclear annihilation during the podcast interview.
“It’s maybe the first time that we lived under the shadow of every human dying at once, but personally, we’ve always lived under the shadow of plague, shadow of war,” he said. “And what you do is you do what you can and then you live a good life.”
Soares said he lives by doing everything he can to stop human extinction from AI, which he adds he does not think is “inevitable.”
The host, Nicholas Thompson, later presses on Soares on Thompson’s own skepticism of the idea AI will destroy us all. Thompson notes that there are still a lot of bumps and limitations on even the most advanced AI technology currently available.
Soares then compared the technology’s rise to cars gradually replacing horses.
“You could imagine a lot of horses looking at the development of the car and saying, “Well, there’s all these things the car can’t do yet,’” Soares told Thompson. “We are seeing AIs get better and better at things. We’re seeing them able to take on longer and longer tasks.”
Soares clarifies he’s not an “AI jobs apocalypse guy.”
“I’m an ‘AI kills all humans’ guy, in which case you’ll be at full employment actually. We’ll be at full employment the moment before we’re all killed off,” Soares said with some hint of dark humor.
The expert later lays out his solution to preventing the AI apocalypse: by limiting the “scaling up” of the technology. How AI is currently used, such as trying to find cancer cures, is fine, he said.
“But AI trying to mimic and surpass human intelligence is not what we want,” he said. “We shouldn’t be shooting for it.”
