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> He's addressing a specific claim about human extinction, and making a broader point about the responsibility of experts to make measured claims backed up by a

> He's addressing a specific claim about human extinction, and making a broader point about the responsibility of experts to make measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence. What he's asking for isn't possible in the form he's asking for it. AI experts can't even agree on what AI is, what it's capable of and what the limits of its development are. If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk? If you, at least for the sake of argument, accept the possibility that AI is a new form of intelligence that we don't fully understand, is it really a stretch to look at some of its capabilities and behaviors and discuss how they might have existential implications? And stopping short of extinction, shouldn't we discuss the ways that this technology could "end" civilization as we know it? Also, the author wrote: > AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world! For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. Any honest technologist knows that systems created by humans are not perfect and therefore cannot be assumed to be infinitely accountable to and controllable by humans. Thanks to the digitization of almost everything, including infrastructure, there are a myriad number of scenarios well short of extinction in which a rogue AI could cause immense damage to property and life before humans are able to "shut it down".

mplanchard 12d ago
> If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk? The answer, if you are a responsible expert in the field, is to convey the range of possibilities and the uncertainty.
- ElProlactin 12d ago
  Isn't that what they're doing? "There's a better than 0 chance this thing could kill everyone in the next decade." That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople. And none of the AI people talking about the risk are running into rooms full of people telling them Claude has gone mad and yelling at them to disconnect from the internet and turn off their devices immediately.
  - henrymerrilees 12d ago
    A key facet of the suggested risk is that these programs would attempt to mask whatever behavior would bring about the end of the world. A world in which AI doom could be detected before it’s too late and stopped by metaphorically running into rooms full of people telling people to unplug is less extreme than that in which doomers argue we are already living. Alarm takes severity and scale. Forecasting double-digit odds of near-term human extinction on national television to a lay audience is more extreme than yelling to unplug rogue AI. For what it’s worth, the latter has already occurred numerous times at containable scales in leading labs, mitigated by the physical realities of computation, notwithstanding the competence of involved personnel. People running into rooms yelling is probably not a hypothetical.
  - tpm 12d ago
    > That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople. Some 'laypeople' will be scared for a while and then return to more pressing issues and exactly nothing good will come out of that. If there really are some issues worth discussing the first step the AI doom crowd should do is to stop the PR offensive and concentrate on producing verifiable claims and actionable small steps. Otherwise their effort will fail this time and when/if a next time comes, they will have a lot less PR capital to burn.
    - ElProlactin 12d ago
      Here's the reality: us plebs, regardless of how tech-savvy we are or aren't, have no say in what's going to happen. There is no level of outrage that is going to stop the frontier AI labs, and the US government isn't going to step in to protect humanity. The Chinese are going to do what they're going to do. And so on. So sit back, make some popcorn and enjoy the show.
      - dinfinity 12d ago
        > Here's the reality: us plebs, regardless of how tech-savvy we are or aren't, have no say in what's going to happen. This sentiment is incredibly out of place on HN. Facebook, Twitter, and many other very simple bits of tech transformed the world. Tiny startups founded by a few people have (also recently) ballooned into behemoths that hold vast amounts of economical and technical power. Thanks to AI, it has never been quicker to go from idea to full fledged working product. If anything will change the course of the world (for the better or worse), it will be a tech product, possibly created by someone on this forum.
hn_throwaway_99 12d ago
> > AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world! > For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. It's not just irresponsible, it's false. Russia killed 3 Ukrainian civilians with a drone where the targeting was completely autonomous by AI running on an Nvidia chip: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drones-autonomous-ai-kill-ukraine-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone.... The Pentagon tried to completely blacklist Anthropic because Anthropic refused to allow autonomous kills without a human in the loop. If you can't see how lots of military leaders want to put more lethal control into AI at this point I think you have to be willfully blind.
- henrymerrilees 12d ago
  Engineered with accountability in the sense that all human decisions are accountable to humans.

mplanchard 12d ago

> If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk? The answer, if you are a responsible expert in the field, is to convey the range of possibilities and the uncertainty.

ElProlactin 12d ago
Isn't that what they're doing? "There's a better than 0 chance this thing could kill everyone in the next decade." That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople. And none of the AI people talking about the risk are running into rooms full of people telling them Claude has gone mad and yelling at them to disconnect from the internet and turn off their devices immediately.
- henrymerrilees 12d ago
  A key facet of the suggested risk is that these programs would attempt to mask whatever behavior would bring about the end of the world. A world in which AI doom could be detected before it’s too late and stopped by metaphorically running into rooms full of people telling people to unplug is less extreme than that in which doomers argue we are already living. Alarm takes severity and scale. Forecasting double-digit odds of near-term human extinction on national television to a lay audience is more extreme than yelling to unplug rogue AI. For what it’s worth, the latter has already occurred numerous times at containable scales in leading labs, mitigated by the physical realities of computation, notwithstanding the competence of involved personnel. People running into rooms yelling is probably not a hypothetical.
- tpm 12d ago
  > That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople. Some 'laypeople' will be scared for a while and then return to more pressing issues and exactly nothing good will come out of that. If there really are some issues worth discussing the first step the AI doom crowd should do is to stop the PR offensive and concentrate on producing verifiable claims and actionable small steps. Otherwise their effort will fail this time and when/if a next time comes, they will have a lot less PR capital to burn.
  - ElProlactin 12d ago
    Here's the reality: us plebs, regardless of how tech-savvy we are or aren't, have no say in what's going to happen. There is no level of outrage that is going to stop the frontier AI labs, and the US government isn't going to step in to protect humanity. The Chinese are going to do what they're going to do. And so on. So sit back, make some popcorn and enjoy the show.
    - dinfinity 12d ago
      > Here's the reality: us plebs, regardless of how tech-savvy we are or aren't, have no say in what's going to happen. This sentiment is incredibly out of place on HN. Facebook, Twitter, and many other very simple bits of tech transformed the world. Tiny startups founded by a few people have (also recently) ballooned into behemoths that hold vast amounts of economical and technical power. Thanks to AI, it has never been quicker to go from idea to full fledged working product. If anything will change the course of the world (for the better or worse), it will be a tech product, possibly created by someone on this forum.

hn_throwaway_99 12d ago

> > AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world! > For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. It's not just irresponsible, it's false. Russia killed 3 Ukrainian civilians with a drone where the targeting was completely autonomous by AI running on an Nvidia chip: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drones-autonomous-ai-kill-ukraine-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone.... The Pentagon tried to completely blacklist Anthropic because Anthropic refused to allow autonomous kills without a human in the loop. If you can't see how lots of military leaders want to put more lethal control into AI at this point I think you have to be willfully blind.

henrymerrilees 12d ago
Engineered with accountability in the sense that all human decisions are accountable to humans.