Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeo recently pegged his “chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization” between 10% and 25%.
That’s comforting.
So in our second episode of the six-part Cerebral Valley podcast, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I played out the doomsday scenarios. We talked a lot about science fiction and how writers have imagined artificial intelligence turning dystopian.
In the second half of the episode, I talked with science fiction author, Daniel H. Wilson. He wrote the books How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where’s My Jetpack? and How to Build a Robot Army. Wilson has also consulted with the military to help them game out how dystopian technologies might unfold.
Of course, even in the Anthropic CEO’s estimation, the most likely scenario is probably a more boring one: artificial intelligence doesn’t try to secretly destroy us as we sleep in our beds.
But the fact that there’s a chance is certainly worth considering.