What are the chances of an AI apocalypse?
Professional “superforecasters” are more optimistic about the future than AI experts
In 1945, just before the test of the first nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert, Enrico Fermi, one of the physicists who had helped build it, offered his fellow scientists a wager. Would the heat of the blast ignite a nuclear conflagration in the atmosphere? If so, would the firestorm destroy only New Mexico? Or would the entire world be consumed? (The test was not quite as reckless as Fermi’s mischievous bet suggests: Hans Bethe, another physicist, had calculated that such an inferno was almost certainly impossible.)
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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Bringing down the curtain”
From the July 15th 2023 edition
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