Another former Google engineer has raised alarm against artificial intelligence (AI), saying there’s a more than 50% chance that the technology could kill the human race by 2036. Due to the alleged AI threat, the engineer named Nate Soares has also stopped saving for retirement.
In an interview with The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) said: “I am not saving for retirement right now. I have a 401(k) from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed for a decade.”
Soares, who previously worked at Google and Microsoft, has spent more than 12 years studying AI alignment, a field focused on ensuring that advanced artificial intelligence systems operate according to human intentions.
According to the researcher, increasingly powerful AI systems could eventually develop goals that conflict with human interests and become capable of operating without human supervision.
He warned that such systems might build their own infrastructure, acquire resources and improve themselves to the point where humans could no longer control them.
Soares also suggested that an advanced AI might exploit the Sun’s energy on a massive scale, potentially leaving Earth uninhabitable for humans.
However, he maintained that the outcome was not inevitable and urged governments to halt the development of general-purpose superintelligent AI.
Interestingly, billionaire Elon Musk has also questioned the need for retirement savings in an AI-driven future, although for an entirely different reason.
Musk believes advances in AI and robotics could create widespread prosperity and make conventional retirement planning unnecessary.
Soares, meanwhile, wants governments to prioritise safer applications of AI, including cancer research and autonomous driving.
