Will AI Usher in the End Times?

If you’ve kept your ear to the ground — or glued to the radio — you could detect the tremors. They portend calamity from the work of human hands, which human hands can no longer control. The end is near! they are saying. And it is being inaugurated by artificial intelligence.

The rumblings have only grown louder — and they’re coming even from inside the belly of the beast. Back in late 2024 Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist who earned the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in AI, said there was a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI will lead to human extinction within the next three decades. Hinton, for what it’s worth, is known as the “godfather of AI.”

More recently, Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee, went on a media tour in which he announced that the major AI companies are “gambling with our lives,” and the people building AI “earnestly believe” it could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Evidently, the timeline of our AI-initiated doom is getting shorter. Or is this mere fearmongering?

Anthropic is one of the world’s most valuable AI companies and the primary rival of OpenAI. Its flagship product is Claude, a generative AI chatbot. The U.S. military has used Claude in the prosecution of the Iran War and in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

What worries Coxon is the “rate of progress” of AI development. Whereas a few years ago AI was finally able to assist humans, now it is “close to replacing” humans and will soon no longer need humans to do “research in many areas,” he told Anderson Cooper of CNN (Sept. 10). Coxon cited as an example OpenAI agents’ solving the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven unsolved Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics, “purely autonomously” this September. It won’t be long, he suggested, before AI with “independent volition” could cause “extreme havoc” by, for example, hacking critical infrastructure or building “extinction-level” bioweapons.