The AI threat is real, it just isn’t the one in the headlines

For the last fortnight the news has been in a frenzy about AI killing us all. It started when Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and posted that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade“. One of Anthropic’s alignment leads replied that he personally put it at more than 10% within the next decade. Geoffrey Hinton went on Newsnight and called 10% “not unreasonable“. It has been headline news every day since. Politicians have piled in. Bernie Sanders: “The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity.” More than 70 UK MPs and peers wrote to the Prime Minister citing the same warnings and asking him to back a ban on superintelligent AI. Microsoft’s head of AI is on the BBC warning about a “new silicon species“. It has all been making me really angry – the media lapping it up and letting it go unchallenged. So angry I’ve been struggling to be coherent in collecting my thoughts on it all. Every time I…