AI fearmongers forget we could just jail tech execs until morale and model safety improve
OPINION Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly announced his resignation on X late Monday over concerns that AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade." A lot of people have expressed opinions about his point of view, leading to more than 110 million views of the message in less than 24 hours, perhaps helped along by X algorithms that boost messages critical of owner Elon Musk's AI rivals, Anthropic and OpenAI. But the real problem isn't the models themselves, but the companies who carelessly unleash them on the world and don't take any responsibility for what their products do
Coxon's former colleague, science lead Evan Hubinger, insists his view is a fair assessment of what employees really think.
"Jacob is correct here – we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10 percent within the next decade," wrote Hubinger in a social media post. "I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."(Aside: If you want a surefire bet on a prediction market, take the "no." If you're right, you get paid. If you're wrong, there's no one to pay. The problem of course is prediction market manipulation: Those betting against you might steer us toward the apocalypse to score a Pyrrhic victory.)There are good reasons to be concerned about the impact of AI. Coxon and Hubinger obviously have deep knowledge of the technology. But their broader concerns about how AI affects the world are unpersuasive.For example, Coxon said, "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. … No other human activity poses this level of danger."Here's one: Human-induced climate change. In 2023, according to researchers, more than 178,000 deaths can be attributed to a global heat wave. "More than half (54.29 percent) of heatwave-related deaths were attributable to human-induced climate change," they claim.That's 96,636 deaths attributable to human activity – or perhaps lack of it – just in the context of a heat wave. The World Health Organization says, "Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone." Some portion of that follows from human activity, perhaps including the construction of data centers that put millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.Commercial AI chatbots have allegedly played a role in a few dozen deaths, some of which were suicides – a small fraction of the 48,824 suicide deaths in 2024, per the CDC.
