Will AI really kill everyone? How, exactly?

“Scientific claims require falsifiability precisely to avoid the nature of religious arguments,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and a former OpenAI safety engineer. “You need to be able to prove or disprove them.”

Then there are nuclear weapons, which have existed for more than 80 years and are generally understood to be capable of killing off all human life. Could AI commandeer them?

Khlaaf points out that nuclear facilities are “air-gapped” from the publicly accessible internet, which limits the ways AI agents could get at the controls. “These systems are built to a completely different, rigorous and regulated engineering standard that often requires physical hardening,” she said. Stuxnet, the computer worm that damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities, had to be introduced to the system through a physical USB drive, she noted.

Read the article here.