Anxieties around an AI doomsday have been ramping up for months, and executives at top AI companies have done little to ease those worries. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said humanity could lose control of the technology. Anthropic warned that its models could be abused to create chemical weapons.
But no AI leaders have looked people dead in the eye and said they specifically are going to be killed by artificial intelligence—until now.
Enter Paul Christiano, an OpenAI board member serving on its Safety and Security Committee. Earlier this week while speaking at the AI Safety Foundation’s annual Hinton Lectures, Christiano said he believes an AI takeover is imminent and that it spells certain doom for the human race.
“For most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident,” Christiano told the crowd.
What does an AI takeover mean to Christiano? He described it as “a situation where there are AI systems pursuing goals, and those systems call the shots in the same sense that humans today call the shots and what happens on Earth.”
“If, say, you or me or Donald Trump wanted to stop them, [we] would be as ineffective as if you or me were trying to stop the U.S. military,” he added.
Christiano’s AI timeline
How soon could humanity’s AI downfall happen? Christiano predicts it could occur within the next six months, or—somewhat more reassuringly?—take up to three years.
“If we tried to develop AI along the most rapid trajectory, if we said we’re just going to build this as quickly as we can in the easiest way we can, we would be looking at something like a coin flip of an AI takeover,” he reasoned.
On the bright side, Christiano said companies are avoiding that coin flip by pacing the frontier, as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei recommended after a former employee accused both Anthropic and OpenAI of “gambling with our lives.”
However, Christiano warns that “even with realistic policy responses, the risk remains exceptionally high.”If anything, his outlook has grown slightly more urgent since joining OpenAI’s board in September. At the time, he estimated a 4% chance of losing control of AI within a year—double the six-month minimum he floated this week—and a 15% chance within three years (odds he acknowledged are based on his subjective beliefs).
“If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment, I expect we will permanently lose control of it,” Christiano wrote in a personal statement. “If that happens then most people could die. I believe we would need domestic and international coordination to ensure global consistency and reduce risk to an acceptable level.”
