They really do think AI might kill everyone

A recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again. Among other things, he said: The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. People really believe this Many people found it hard to believe that AI researchers think this way. Some explained it as a PR campaign to promote AI regulation, or as self-promotion, or as a way to boost AI company stock prices. Others felt it had to be impossible, because if you really believed this you’d be bombing datacenters instead of posting on Twitter. In fact, not only do many AI researchers1 seriously believe this, they’ve been thinking and writing about it since the mid-2000s. Eliezer Yudkowsky — the ur-figure for most modern AI safety culture — has been publishing papers since at least 2008 saying that superintelligent AI could destroy all human life. It’s been such a common idea that the AI research community has abbreviated “how likely you think…