While Elon Musk has consistently painted a utopian picture of AI’s future, many other tech leaders and governments have been sounding the alarm about the technology’s dangers. Google DeepMind’s chief AI readiness officer, Lila Ibrahim, even signed a 2023 statement declaring that mitigating the risk of human extinction from AI should be treated as seriously as nuclear war—and now she’s revealing just how likely she thinks that doomsday scenario actually is.
“It’s not zero,” Ibrahim told Fortune. “Anything beyond that is just me guessing… that’s the engineer in me.”
Although three years have passed since Ibrahim signed the Center for AI Safety’s statement, alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, she said it would still “be irresponsible of us not to talk about existential risk.”
Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI,” has put the odds of human extinction at 10% to 20% within just three decades. Amodei said there’s a 25% chance the future (i.e. our existence) will go “really, really badly.” Even the late physicist Stephen Hawking—who relied on AI to share his respected views with the world—warned it could end mankind, nearly a decade before ChatGPT came on the scene.
