A former student at the prestigious MIT university said that she decided to drop out because she feared that the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) would lead to a catastrophe on a planetary scale.
A former student at the prestigious MIT university said that she decided to drop out because she feared that the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) would lead to a catastrophe on a planetary scale.
«I was worried that AGI would prevent me from making it to the end of the year. I think that in most scenarios, given the way we’re working on AGI, we’re going to end up with the extinction of humanity,» Alice Blair told Futurism.
She enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considered one of the best in the US and the world, in 2023. Blair had hoped to meet people interested in AI safety there, but was disappointed. She currently works as a Technical Writer at the nonprofit Center for AI Safety and has no plans to return to MIT.
«I foresee my future lying in the real world», — says Alice Blair.
Creating AGI, a system that equals or surpasses human intelligence, is the goal of the artificial intelligence field. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the recent launch of the GPT-5 AI model an important step towards AGI.
However, many experts are skeptical that we are getting close to creating such powerful AI, and point to recent signs that the technology’s improvement has plateaued.
«It is extremely unlikely that AGI will appear in the next five years. It is simply a marketing ploy when so many fundamental problems (such as hallucinations and errors in reasoning) remain unsolved,» says Gary Marcus, an artificial intelligence researcher and outspoken critic of the industry.
He added that there are already very real forms of harm that artificial intelligence can cause, but the complete extinction of humanity is somewhat far-fetched.
Researchers at Google DeepMind have a different view, having released a white paper explaining how to safely develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). Despite skeptics' predictions, they believe that AI of this level could appear relatively soon, and they consider 4 ways in which it could cause harm.
