Suddenly everyone’s worried about AI wiping out humanity. But why and how could it do that? Here’s what we know

Article content

As the new master species of a sort, AI might parallel human development, which has brought about the extinction of thousands of species, often inadvertently by destroying habitat and food chains in pursuit of human goals, notes Bourgon.

Article content

With misaligned AI chasing its own ends, “you can imagine a future where the earth is converted into a giant data centre or a space-probe launching system … and we have fallen by the wayside,” Swedish philosopher Nick Ostrom – who came up with the Paperclip analogy – told India’s FirstPost recently.

Article content

Article content

Still, if there are conceivable reasons why AI would seek human destruction directly or by neglect, how would such behaviour even be possible for software “stuck” in a computer?

Article content

AI researchers Alessandro Di Nuovo and Samuele Vinanzi of England’s Sheffield Hallam University suggested recently the physical job of eliminating humans would be beyond the abilities of even advanced AI. Creating deadly viruses requires “trained humans operating specialized equipment”; nuclear plants – and presumably missile silos – are “air-gapped” from the public internet, they note.

Article content

Article content

But the prophets of AI catastrophe argue that little actually stands in the way of superintelligent AI manipulating the concrete world.

Article content

Computer systems are already embedded in a vast amount of infrastructure, and AI designers have been quick to integrate their creations with the internet as a way to exploit their abilities and make them smarter, notes Bourgon.

Article content

Billionaire Elon Musk has plans to produce a million humanoid, AI-linked robots a year. Anthropic is actually experimenting with partly automated wet labs to allow AI agents to work on medical treatments.

Article content

And artificial intelligence that is brainier than humans could hire people through apps like TaskRabbit to carry out jobs that seem innocuous, but ultimately lead to calamity for humans, Bourgon says. There’s already a site called rentahuman.ai whose goal is to find people to do work for AI agents.

Article content

“AI does not need to become a humanoid robot to threaten humanity,” says Yampolskiy. “A sufficiently capable autonomous AI could exploit this infrastructure, manipulate humans, acquire resources and coordinate actions globally”

Article content

Article content

In the various doomsday scenarios, superintelligent AI brings about the end of humanity in a single event, or renders humans as powerless and vulnerable as mice or ants are to us.

Article content

Canadian-trained philosopher and mathematician Atoosa Kasirzadeh, a scientist at Google DeepMind and a Carnegie Mellon University professor, has posited a calamitous future that’s arguably easier to imagine.

Article content

AI data centre products at a trade show in Seoul, South Korea, on April 22, 2026. Computer systems are already embedded in a vast amount of infrastructure. Photo by SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Article content

In a paper last year, she argued that a string of smaller AI-driven crises could culminate in an existential end. Deepfakes and other misinformation reach a “critical point,” AI-enabled mass surveillance chills public discourse, unemployment soars to unprecedented levels amid economic instability – and finally the era’s pervasive, highly sophisticated hacking creates a global power black-out.

Article content

As chaos reigns, regional and then wider wars erupt with uncontrolled use of AI weaponry, a “perfect storm situation where not only is recovery extremely challenging, but the potential for irreversible collapse is a stark reality,” Kasirzadeh writes.

Article content

So, assuming the doomsday projections are valid, what’s the answer? Yampolskiy advocates putting a freeze on developing autonomous, superintelligent AI, using less-advanced agents instead for targeted tasks like finding cures. Even the industry is calling for more government regulation, co-ordinated globally if possible.