‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’ Is the New Gospel of AI Doom
A new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that the race to build artificial superintelligence will result in human extinction.
Illustration: Haley Jiang for Bloomberg
The prophets of Silicon Valley have changed their tune. At least some of them.
Not long ago, tech visionaries saw a rosy future full of leisure and abundance. Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist hired by Google co-founder Larry Page to further the company’s machine-learning technology, once foretold liberation from the prison of mortal human bodies as consciousness ascended to the cloud. Today Silicon Valley’s most influential futurists aren’t peddling so much optimism — after all, who’d believe them?