It’s a weird time to be an AI doomer.
This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad—very, very bad—for humanity.
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But a number of developments … have put them on the back foot. Talk of an AI bubble has overwhelmed the discourse as tech companies continue to invest in multiple Manhattan Projects’ worth of data centers without any certainty that future demand will match what they’re building.
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So where does this leave the doomers? …[W]e decided to ask some of the movement’s biggest names to see if the recent setbacks and general vibe shift had altered their views. …
Recent interviews with 20 people who study or advocate AI safety and governance—including Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio, and high-profile experts like former OpenAI board member Helen Toner—reveal that rather than feeling chastened or lost in the wilderness, they’re still deeply committed to their cause, believing that AGI [artificial general intelligence] remains not just possible but incredibly dangerous.
