This is not your tech oligarchs’ AI apocalypse

(RNS) — This week has offered up another round of predictions about the coming AI apocalypse. A former Anthropic researcher made news by publicly resigning his post and sounding the alarm, warning that some of the people building the next generation of AI are continuing to do so while believing it could kill us all.

A single concerned former employee would be one thing, but his fears quickly ricocheted among others with similarly close access to these systems, several of whom publicly agreed with his forecast, with one prominent Anthropic researcher putting the chance of AI-caused human extinction within the next decade at greater than 10 percent.

Within days, members of the U.S. Congress were demanding action, AI executives were calling for the race to slow down and headlines seemed to appear daily explaining, sometimes in unnerving detail, how artificial intelligence might bring about our end.

The news cycle around AI these last few years has been vacillating between proclamations of salvation and portents of destruction with almost predictable regularity. One week artificial intelligence is going to help us cure cancer, solve climate change and usher in a post-scarcity…