Could AI wipe out humanity? Google DeepMind executive says risk is 'not zero'

Google DeepMind Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim has declined to put a number on the odds of AI causing human extinction, but she isn't ruling it out either. "It's not zero," she told Fortune, adding that anything more precise would be "just me guessing".

She has signed the Center for AI Safety’s 2023 statement along with the co-founders of Anthropic and OpenAI, stating that mitigation of AI extinction risk ought to take precedence over nuclear war and pandemics as a global priority.

Three years later, she feels it would be "irresponsible" not to keep talking about existential risks, especially when the technology has developed so much.

Her warnings have been echoed by some more alarming voices among her peers. Hinton, known as the "godfather of AI", sees an extinction risk of 10% to 20% in the next thirty years, while Amodei says there is a 25% risk of the future going “really, really badly".

Stephen Hawking, a physicist and user of AI tools, gave similar warnings long before ChatGPT existed.

Ibrahim draws a parallel with the pandemic, noting that catastrophic risks are not always the ones people see coming and that industries have historically failed to weigh risk properly during earlier tech shifts such as the rise of the internet and social media.

Ibrahim is equally sceptical of rosier forecasts. Elon Musk recently told The Economist that "money won't matter" by 2036, predicting cheap abundance and universal high income as robots take over work.

Bezos has predicted millions of people residing in space in the year 2045, whereas Altman has predicted the creation of new job openings for graduates in space. However, neither Ibrahim seems to be convinced by any of the above predictions and insists that AI technology is developing rapidly to make any of these predictions feasible.

While talking about the predictions made above, Ibrahim has stated that she was interested in using AI to resolve immediate issues like climate changes and pollution caused due to industrial waste. She was of the opinion that while making use of AI technology, it should not benefit only a few companies.