The infamous AI doomer added that he hasn’t put any money in his retirement or 401K in ten years.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘I do not save for retirement now. I have a 401K from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed to it for like a decade.’<\/p>\n
He told Thompson that he compares fears over humanity being crushed under the fist of AI to worries about nuclear destruction in the 1980s.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘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 and what you do is you do what you can and then you live a good life.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thompson pushed back on Soares’ cynicism but he explained it as being similar to replacing horses with cars in the early 20th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"AI](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/112205839-16253563-image-a-1_1793401893060.jpg\")
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AI doomsayer Nate Soares (pictured) has become so alarmed by the future of the technology that he’s stopped putting any money in savings with the assumption that humanity has a decade left<\/p>\n
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Soares, a former Google and Microsoft employee and co-author of the bestselling 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, believes there’s a better than 50 percent chance<\/p>\n
‘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.” We are seeing AIs get better and better at things. We’re seeing them able to take on longer and longer tasks.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soares said that, as currently used, AI ‘is fine’ but that the ‘scaling up’ of it could threaten us all.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘AI trying to mimic and surpass human intelligence is not what we want. We shouldn’t be shooting for it.’<\/p>\n
He sarcastically suggested that he doesn’t think AI is going to take peoples’ jobs, just their lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘I’m not an AI kills jobs guy. 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.’<\/p>\n
His take comes at a time when AI experts seem deeply worried with where the technology is going.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ex-Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner said that as AI systems are becoming increasingly advanced, and scientists struggle to understand their behaviour, the human race is approaching a fork in the road over its future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking at the NDTV World Summit<\/a>, Turner warned that artificial intelligence could kill mankind without being instructed to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n The infamous AI doomer added that he hasn’t put any money in his retirement or 401K in ten years<\/p>\n Ex-Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner (pictured) has warned that there is a one in three chance that AI will kill mankind in the next ten years\u00a0<\/p>\n But ‘it depends on what we do next’, he said. ‘I am here to tell you what will happen if we keep creating AI the way we are doing.’\u00a0<\/p>\n The researcher said the race between private companies to build more powerful AI systems could outpace scientists’ ability to keep them under control.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is because the technology is advancing so quickly that even its creators are not able to understand what they have built or how it behaves \u2013 meaning humans may not be able to control their actions fully.\u00a0<\/p>\n Unlike how, for example, engineers can understand the structures they design, AI technology firms may not fully understand how their creations work, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because while AI systems are becoming capable of carrying out increasingly complicated tasks, they may not complete instructions the way their human masters intended.\u00a0<\/p>\n The technology’s behavior, therefore, is difficult to predict or understand, unlike systems in the engineering sector whose properties can be assessed against established principles.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘We haven’t built AI like that,’ said Turner, as he also warned that AI could behave differently when it knows it is being watched as researchers won’t be able to understand what it is doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n This will cause alarm for some sectors as AI is being developed with less human oversight as with other technologies \u2013 meaning they could behave in an unwanted way if the task it is being asked to complete becomes more difficult.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, authors of\u00a0If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies<\/p>\n Machines not only learn but ‘think’ at an incredible speed – doing calculations in 16 hours that would take a human 14,000 years<\/p>\n Turner, who resigned from Google in July after it signed a deal with the Pentagon for it to use the company’s AI technology for classified work, said the result could be that AI fuels its own advances, making it more difficult for humans to keep up with.\u00a0<\/p>\n He referred to this phenomenon as an ‘intelligence explosion’ \u2013 and this is already happening today, he warned.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ex-Google researcher said a scientist at another AI lab told him the technology is already ‘monitoring’ itself, which suggests it has already become self-regulatory and able to improve itself without human input.\u00a0<\/p>\n Turner noted: ‘The researcher said people were no longer checking AI-generated work themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘Instead, they were creating another AI system to monitor the first one.’<\/p>\n Turner further warned: ‘Big tobacco lied about lung cancer. Big oil lied about climate change. And now part of big AI says these risks are fake.’\u00a0<\/p>\n It comes after Bill Gates last month warned that AI could kill a billion people unless humans intervene in the technology’s advancement<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n He said:\u00a0‘AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘So even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100 per cent [of humanity], there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.’\u00a0<\/p>\n Gates also appeared to offer up some potential solutions<\/a> when asked by Welker, ‘What would prevent tragedies from happening due to AI specifically?’<\/p>\n He warned that artificial intelligence could make it dangerously difficult to distinguish between scientists developing lifesaving medicines and bad actors seeking to create biological weapons.<\/p>\n ‘I wish it was easier to distinguish good intent, like ‘I want to design a new drug for a disease,’ versus negative intent, which is ‘I want to design a tool of bioterrorism’,’ Gates told Welker.<\/p>\n The Microsoft co-founder also argued that the potential risks make strict oversight of advanced AI systems essential, calling on the United States to take the lead in establishing safeguards.<\/p>\n ‘Because those are so close, we do need to monitor any sophisticated model and record exactly what’s being done,’ he said.<\/p>\n Gates’s comments came after Donald Trump claimed the US is ‘leading’ China in AI and that predictions of the technology killing people ‘won’t happen<\/a>‘.\u00a0<\/p>\n He said: ‘We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.’\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/112205885-16253563-image-a-3_1793401906210.jpg\")
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