No Jacob, the end of the world will be depressingly boring

It’s been quite entertaining watching the news circuit this week as ex-Anthropic engineer, Jacob Coxon, has declared that AI may well imminently lead to the extinction of humanity.

Cripes.

And while I do understand where he’s coming from - the capability of frontier models is frankly staggering at times (though to be clear I mean both staggeringly good and staggeringly bad…) - I really don’t think it’s going to be as exciting & sexy as people think it will be.

Internet Blackout!

Fiscal meltdown and all currency deleted!!

BiOwEaPoNs!!!

NUCLEAR LAUNCH CODES!!!!!!

T-2000 TERMINATOR MODELS WITH MYTHOS 8.7 ULTRA-EXTINCTION ROCKET PLASMA LAUNCHERS EQUIPPED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...

I wish! How awesome would that be!

No, rather I expect that AI will likely lead to a slow destabilisation of the socioeconomic system that humanity currently depends on. It will take decades, and like I’ve already said be incredibly slow & boring, but could well have (eventually) catastrophic effects on how our civilisation functions and the role of ‘humans’. 

I expect it will start with rising unemployment & slow but sure unilateral domination by the MANGOS (Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX etc). Will we see paradoxical scenarios of massive GDP growth but soaring unemployment? Perhaps an ultra-centralisation of wealth into the few? But unemployed people still require money to survive so what happens then? More state welfare funding / universal basic incomes? How generous might that be? And if so, why does anyone need to bother get a job anymore? Perhaps we will all become sedentary sloths, glued to the TV binge-watching auto-played AI-generated slop tailored to our interests.

Wait that sounds eerily like what is already happening (check out https://infiniteslop.ai/) Ah heck.

Anyway, neither I nor anyone knows the answer to these questions and frankly it could go in a million different ways. Unfortunately I just don’t think any of them will involve something as cool as 5,000,000 Mythos ultra agents with dynamic cloaking and neutron pulsar bombs methodically teleporting around the world destructing the human race.

So yes, thanks Jacob for the stark warning but take a deep breath and perhaps go have a cold shower because this isn't Hollywood - this is the boring (& real) world.