{"id":386811,"date":"2026-04-19T05:05:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T05:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/386811\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T05:05:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T05:05:26","slug":"bill-maher-issues-dire-warning-about-1-threat-humanity-is-fking-around-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/386811\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Maher Issues Dire Warning About 1 Threat Humanity Is ‘F**king Around With’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Maher<\/a> closed out Friday\u2019s \u201cReal Time<\/a>\u201d with a dire warning about artificial intelligence<\/a>, noting just how ominous its progression has been and asking why we\u2019re even building a \u201csuper intelligence that can outthink us\u201d \u2014 before addressing \u201canother scary thing\u201d about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who run it, i.e., the people who run the world,\u201d said Maher<\/a>. \u201cAnd it\u2019s like five guys. Five guys who, between them and working as a team, couldn\u2019t correctly read a social cue. I wouldn\u2019t let these guys around a mixed drink, let alone my personal data.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cSo, just to be clear, what we\u2019re doing here, we\u2019re letting a handful of hoodie-wearing, on-the-spectrum sociopaths, practically robots themselves, roll the dice on species extinction. You see an out-of-control robot and you run.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came the punchline: \u201cMark Zuckerberg sees one and thinks, \u2018Dad?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Photos on screen identified the five people in question as Anthropic<\/a> CEO Dario Amodei, Palantir<\/a> co-founder Peter Thiel, OpenAI<\/a>\u2019s Sam Altman, X<\/a> CEO Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, who runs Meta<\/a>. Maher spent his entire \u201cNew Rules\u201d segment on their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the people who are making AI are scared of AI, it\u2019s time to shut the whole thing down until we can figure out what the hell is going on,\u201d he said, imitating President Donald Trump<\/a>, adding he hopes aliens will \u201csave us from ourselves\u201d before AI becomes sentient.<\/p>\n

Maher continued, \u201cBecause last week, Anthropic, one of the big AI developing companies, announced its newest version of Claude called Mythos, which they say has \u2018capabilities substantially beyond those of any model we have previously trained.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The comedian noted that Mythos was developed to prevent cyber attacks and that it can thus \u201cdo the hacking\u201d itself, which is why Anthropic won\u2019t make it public and only release it to 40 large corporations \u2014 including Google<\/a>, Apple<\/a> and JPMorgan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, the good guys,\u201d he joked.<\/p>\n

Maher said Musk warned AI could be \u201cmore dangerous than nukes.\u201d He noted it\u2019s \u201calready convinced people to kill themselves,\u201d asking, \u201cI mean, what was the plan? Just create an all-powerful, self-sustaining super intelligence that can outthink us and then see what happens?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSam Altman, the head of OpenAI, says that it\u2019s not that far off when robots can build other robots and data centers that can build other data centers,\u201d said Maher. \u201cAnd then what? I keep asking this question. What do we do when everyone\u2019s job gets taken?\u201d<\/p>\n

He noted Altman himself said in 2023<\/a> that he was \u201cafraid\u201d of what he was creating, that Musk admitted in 2018<\/a> that AI \u201cscares the hell out of me\u201d and that Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI, said last year there is a 10% to 20% chance<\/a> that AI is \u201can extinction event.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re fucking around with something that has a 20% chance of extinction?\u201d Maher asked.<\/p>\n

He closed by stating that most people still think you can simply unplug something to stop AI from improving itself, but that all leading models will \u201cfight back\u201d and \u201cblackmail you\u201d if you try<\/a>. He said \u201cAI programs are geniuses,\u201d but unfortunately, \u201calso psychopaths.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn war games, they choose the nuclear option far more than humans do because they can only calculate,\u201d said Maher, citing a recent study<\/a>. \u201cThey have no humanity. They have no conscience. They don\u2019t have that thing that gives human beings pause.\u201d<\/p>\n

He concluded, \u201cAI is not like a human mother who mostly has an instinct so strong to protect the baby, she will sacrifice her own life for it. AI ain\u2019t that kind of mother. It\u2019s the psycho mom who drives the kids into a lake \u2014 where we\u2019re all happily swimming.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Maher closed out Friday\u2019s \u201cReal Time\u201d with a dire warning about artificial intelligence, noting just how ominous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,8938,111,139,69,42641,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-386811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-bill-maher","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-real-time","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}