Ex-Google AI Expert Halts Retirement Savings Due to Existential AI Threat

A former Google AI engineer has ceased saving for retirement, citing a deep-seated conviction that artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity. Nate Soares, a machine learning researcher with prior experience at Google and Microsoft, stated in a recent podcast that he believes AI is more likely than not to cause human extinction within the next ten years.

Soares, currently the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, an organization known for its focus on "AI doomerism," estimates the probability of AI-driven extinction within the coming decade at over 50 percent. "I guess right now it looks like we probably don’t have a decade on the clock," Soares said on the podcast, hosted by The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson. He added that it is "more than 50% that we don’t have a decade at this point."

This belief has led Soares to stop contributing to his retirement savings for the past decade. "I do not save for retirement now," he explained. "I have a 401K from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed to it for like a decade."

During the interview, Soares drew parallels between the current fear of AI extinction and the pervasive fear of nuclear annihilation that characterized previous eras. "It’s maybe the first time that we lived under the shadow of every human dying at once, but personally, we’ve always lived under the shadow of plague, shadow of war," he remarked. "And what you do is you do what you can and then you live a good life."

Soares emphasized that he works to prevent AI-driven human extinction, which he does not consider inevitable. He noted that while AI's current applications, such as in cancer research, are acceptable, the pursuit of AI that mimics and surpasses human intelligence is problematic.

Addressing skepticism about the imminence of AI threats, Soares compared the rapid advancement of AI to the gradual introduction of automobiles, which eventually replaced horses. "You could imagine a lot of horses looking at the development of the car and saying, 'Well, there’s all these things the car can’t do yet,'" Soares said. "We are seeing AIs get better and better at things. We’re seeing them able to take on longer and longer tasks."

Soares clarified that his concern is not with AI causing widespread job displacement but with the potential for AI to become uncontrollable and pose a threat to human existence. "I’m an ‘AI kills all humans’ guy, in which case you’ll be at full employment actually. We’ll be at full employment the moment before we’re all killed off," he stated, injecting a note of dark humor.

His proposed solution involves limiting the scaling of AI technology. "AI trying to mimic and surpass human intelligence is not what we want," Soares concluded. "We shouldn’t be shooting for it."