A.I. and Human Extinction: Are We Living in End Times?

People have been writing about the existential risk AI potentially poses to humanity for decades. But it was the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who claimed AI companies are "gambling with our future" in their efforts to achieve superintelligence, that made talk of AI's threat to humanity's existence go mainstream. BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire, hoping for a more sober view from the Nobel Prize winner and Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, was shocked when he conceded that giving AI a 10% chance of eradicating humanity was "not an unreasonable estimate". At the same time, Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance casually admitted in a recent interview that he wouldn't be surprised if "the Antichrist is walking amongst us" and speculated about the fact that we might be living in end times. What is going on?

Could we really be living through end times? Is AI really an existential threat to humanity? If so, why are the companies developing this technology allowed to continue their work unimpeded by governments? And how should we explain the strange synergy between MAGA politics and Silicon Valley when it comes to talk about the end of the world?

("The A.I. Researcher Whose Rebellion Is Changing Everything", an interview with Jacob Coxon on September 14)

About the Speaker:

Émile P. Torres is a philosopher and historian whose work focuses on existential threats to civilization and humanity. They have published on a wide range of topics, including machine superintelligence, emerging technologies, and religious eschatology, as well as the history and ethics of human extinction. Their forthcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation (Routledge). Torres has published in a wide range of academic journals, including Synthese, Erkenntnis, Inquiry, Bioethics, Metaphilosophy, AI & Society, Aggression and Violent Behavior, and Futures, as well as popular media outlets such as The Washington Post, New Statesman, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Aeon. They are a contributing writer at Truthdig and, formerly, Salon.

The Moderator:

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.

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The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.