For most people, AI-induced extinction is a topic reserved for late at night after a few too many drinks with friends. But when Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic earlier this month, the argument that AI might kill us all escaped its enclosure.
Pollster David Shor quickly picked up on the change. “AI salience has increased dramatically in the past week,” he wrote on X, “increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined.” Now, “64% of voters think it’s either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity’s survival.”
It’s important to be precise about our terms because extinction and catastrophe aren’t the same. I am worried that increasingly capable AI systems pose catastrophic risks that harm or even kill people. We need to be prepared. But none of this means that AI is going to kill everybody. Indeed, an unfortunate side effect of all this extinction talk is that the real risks of AI aren’t properly understood. And when you actually dive into the literature, it isn’t as bleak as you might think.