'Everyone dies, or worse': The Australians bracing for AI catastrophe
Some experts think AI could spiral into disaster. But with the biggest leaps happening in Silicon Valley, Australia’s safety advocates are scrambling to make a difference.
Hunter Jay is alarmed by the potential of artificial intelligence, but he’s also something of an optimist. He estimates there is only a 20–30% chance that things “go quite badly” as the technology evolves.
“Quite badly,” he said, “meaning everyone dies — or worse.”
Jay, an entrepreneur who last year sold a robotics startup to a European buyer, is part of a growing network in Australia working to lower the odds of what they describe as an AI-driven apocalypse scenario. Those odds, he argues, are higher than most people realise.
“This stuff can happen quite soon and be very transformative, very quickly,” he said.
Jay and his peers fear that AI systems being developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will soon become exponentially smarter than humans. It is difficult to map out exactly how such a cataclysmic scenario might unfold. Jay thinks that doing so would require the very superintelligence that could make it happen.
