The men building AI want us to fear it. We should – but not for the reasons they give
Burry also argued that the incumbents face competition, and that forcing a slowdown on everyone while they are still ahead would benefit them. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) coming up. While Anthropic’s IPO is now expected sometime in , OpenAI’s is likely to be .
IPOs, Burry said, need “hype and puffery…we’re so awesome it could become dangerous is hype and puffery.” In his view, the slowdown talk is cover for a real slowing of growth that the companies cannot control.
AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, formerly co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, has long argued that the idea of superintelligence wiping out humanity is hype and puffery. Responding to the current debate, she has that the talk of a “machine-god” that will wipe us out is meant to distract us from current, ongoing harms.
The use of AI in warfare to kill human beings is one example of such harm. Autonomous drones with AI targeting are already in the Russia-Ukraine war. AI-assisted targeting was also used by the US in its attack on Iran, and by Israel in Gaza. On February 28, 2026, the first day of the joint US-Israeli war against Iran – the American part of which was named Operation Epic Fury – a strike on a primary school in Minab killed at least 156 people, including 120 children, according to Iranian officials. A UN-backed fact-finding mission has since there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed a war crime in that strike. Washington has not publicly acknowledged responsibility.
Crucially, for the purposes of the current debate on AI, this was not an autonomous system deciding to kill. According to Bloomberg’s of September 19 on the Pentagon’s investigation, flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI-assisted targeting contributed to the strike. An analyst had to the site in 2019, but the note never reached those preparing the strike. Bloomberg also reports that no one from the military’s civilian harm team reviewed the site before the strike. This was as much a human failure as a technical one.
Whether what we have now is in fact artificial intelligence can be questioned, but the existence of fully natural human stupidity, unfortunately, is beyond doubt.
On intelligence and stupidity
AI chatbots can already perform feats that no single person can do. They can answer questions on pretty much any topic, in many languages, write everything from poems to code, solve complex math problems, and more. But it turns out that intelligence is rather difficult to define. And so, despite their obvious and growing capabilities, it is possible for very intelligent people, including top scientists, philosophers and entrepreneurs, to disagree on whether the AI systems we now have are in fact intelligent.
Stupidity, too, is not as easy to define as it may seem.
The Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla wrote an essay, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”, first published in Italian in 1976, in which he defined a stupid person as follows: “A person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”
Alongside the stupid, he described a second type, the “bandit”, who gains while causing losses to others. Cipolla’s other two types are the helpless, whose actions benefit others at a loss to themselves, and the intelligent, who bring gains to themselves and others.
Given that the world seems to be owned and ruled by bandits, it is perhaps the unfortunate lot of most ordinary human beings everywhere to suffer losses helplessly. So far, those losses may have been tolerable, but the set of losses now threatened is not.
If AI kills many or most of us, that is not a tolerable loss.
Even if it does not kill us physically, it holds the potential to kill us financially. The risk of job losses due to AI is far closer than the threat of superintelligent rogue AIs. Talk of new jobs being created to replace the millions lost is just that at present – talk. No one can say what new jobs will be created, or how many.
Sceptics argue that the risk of superintelligence – an AI that is more intelligent than the best individual human minds in every cognitively relevant domain, and that may eventually become an AI system or network more intelligent than the sum of all human beings – is also just talk so far. There is nothing to suggest that its development is imminent.
However, the timelines for the projected arrival of superintelligence have been shrinking.
A of 738 AI researchers by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute of the University of Oxford produced an aggregate forecast of a 50 percent chance of “High Level Machine Intelligence” (HLMI) by 2059, down from 2061 in a similar survey held in 2016. HLMI was defined as unaided machines being able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers.
That’s not quite superintelligence, but it is close to AGI and would clearly bring about the jobs apocalypse… except that this survey was done before the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. The AI race only really took off after that.
Since then, experts from academia and industry have offered their own estimates for the arrival of AGI, and the estimates vary. Academics such as Prof Hinton and Turing Award winner Prof Yoshua Bengio have they think it could be here in . Industry leaders offer similar or shorter timelines. Hassabis has suggested . Amodei predicted its arrival in and defended his prediction at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, saying he still thought it wouldn’t be “that far off”. Altman expects it to happen . “Within the decade” has become a commonly voiced expectation.
