Will AI kill us all? Come on.

That was my honest first reaction, and I suspect it is yours. Anyone who has spent an afternoon with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini knows the texture of these tools: astonishingly useful one minute, confidently wrong the next, occasionally unable to follow an instruction a competent teenager would handle without thinking. The distance between a chatbot that invents a court case and a technology that ends the human species looks, from where most of us sit, roughly the distance between a calculator and a Death Star.

What makes the question harder to wave away is who is now willing to entertain it. In 2023 the Center for AI Safety published a single sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The names at the top of the signature list include Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever appears on the page as well. These are not science-fiction novelists or anonymous accounts on X. They are, respectively, a Nobel laureate who helped invent modern neural networks, another Turing Award winner, and the chief executives of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic.

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