Possible scenarios Russell sketches out include a co-ordinated trading attack on financial markets that causes a global recession, cyberattacks that bring down global communication systems, war or civil conflict triggered by the influencing of human opinions, and a small engineered pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese could be initiated by humans using AI<\/a> as a tool, or by AI systems as a form of retaliatory warning to humanity if we try to shut them down,\u201d he says. \u201cEach of these scenarios could result in thousands or millions of deaths, either directly or indirectly (through economic collapse) and cost anywhere from several hundred billion dollars to trillions of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n The view of the AI boss, he says, is that something like this is \u201cthe best we can hope for\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cNot that it would be pleasant, but that\u2019s the only way we\u2019re going to get the regulation,\u201d Russell adds. \u201cAnd without the regulation, we\u2019re heading towards a much bigger disaster.\u201d That disaster would be the end of humanity. <\/p>\n The chief executive is very concerned about a Chernobyl-level event. \u201cBut if they try to pull out of the race or slow down, they\u2019ll just get replaced. Because the investors want to win.\u201d<\/p>\n Russell, 63, is one of the world\u2019s leading authorities on AI. A professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he founded the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, he is also a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He has advised the United Nations and many governments and is the co-author of the standard university textbook on AI.<\/p>\n The creation of superintelligent AI, which exceeds our own intelligence, \u201cwould be the biggest event in human history\u201d, he once said, \u201cand perhaps the last event in human history\u201d. He is president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, which will hold its second annual meeting in Paris in February.<\/p>\n TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE<\/p>\n Four years ago I asked Russell how worried he was about the arrival of artificial intelligence that posed an existential threat. It was not a \u201cvisceral fear\u201d, he said, comparing his concern to how he regarded the advance of climate change. And now? \u201cIt feels quite a lot closer.\u201d<\/p>\n A great deal has happened in those years, notably the release in 2023 of GPT-4, which experts claimed showed \u201csparks of artificial general intelligence\u201d.<\/p>\n Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI<\/a>, the developer of ChatGPT<\/a>, has said that AI is a threat to human civilisation. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI model, was asked what was his P(doom) number, the probability that AI would cause catastrophic harm to humanity. He said 25 per cent. The Google chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said 10 per cent. Elon Musk put his at 20 per cent last year.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we think an acceptable chance of a nuclear meltdown is one in ten million per year, then an acceptable chance of extinction has got to be one in 100 million [to] one in a billion. So our AI systems are 100,000 to a million times too dangerous to allow,\u201d Russell says.<\/p>\n In 2023 Altman, Amodei and many other AI leaders signed a letter which said that mitigation of the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. <\/p>\n Sam Altman,<\/p>\n TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE<\/p>\n However, Altman and Amodei did not join 800 other signatories, including Russell, in a letter in October this year calling for a ban on the development of superintelligent AI until it could be realised safely. \u201cThe investors are not going to tolerate anyone who has second thoughts about this,\u201d Russell says.<\/p>\n \u2022 From urban decay to fabulous wealth, how AI revived San Francisco<\/a><\/p>\n The billionaire Musk<\/a> thinks Russell is \u201cgreat\u201d and posted on X to recommend Russell\u2019s 2019 book Human Compatible, about the problem of controlling AI. Although Musk has warned in the past about the potential existential threat of AI, his company xAI is fully engaged in developing AGI and he too did not sign this year\u2019s letter. \u201cHe\u2019s in the race,\u201d Russell says. \u201cI\u2019ve not talked to Elon for years, and I don\u2019t know how he ended up in the place that he ended up in. But I think he still does talk about the existential risk, and the need to avoid it.\u201d<\/p>\n Russell is sceptical that large language model chatbots, such as ChatGPT, will lead to artificial general intelligence. \u201cWe may have reached pretty much the plateau of what can be achieved. We\u2019ve used up all the high-quality text in the universe.\u201d The evening before we meet at a London coffee shop, he had been marking student papers, a couple of which he believed had been written by AI. \u201cThey were rubbish. Word salad.\u201d<\/p>\n He is also not convinced that we are on the brink of AI making millions of jobs redundant. Despite what management consultancy firms may tell clients, he believes the evidence for AI\u2019s helpfulness is \u201cpretty mixed, even for routine software production, which is always held up as the poster child for how these systems are helping improve productivity\u201d.<\/p>\n Investment in the technology is like nothing else in history, Russell argues \u2014 an estimated \u00a33 trillion by 2028. The cost of the Manhattan Project was the equivalent of an estimated $26 billion today.<\/p>\n There is a 75 per cent chance, Russell thinks, that the AI bubble<\/a> bursts. \u201cI hope that if the bubble bursts and it gives us a decade of respite, then we use that to redirect the technology so that we\u2019re working within the envelope of safe systems.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Stuart](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/\/81836e7a-04fe-4b81-bd56-3fc8ab70d38c.jpg\")
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