{"id":131264,"date":"2026-08-06T07:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T07:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/131264\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T07:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T07:40:13","slug":"google-deepmind-exes-says-ai-extinction-odds-are-not-zero-she-disagrees-with-elon-musk-predictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/131264\/","title":{"rendered":"Google DeepMind exes says AI extinction odds are ‘not zero’\u2014she disagrees with Elon Musk predictions"},"content":{"rendered":"

While Elon Musk has consistently painted a utopian picture of AI\u2019s future<\/a>, many other tech leaders and governments have been sounding the alarm about the technology\u2019s dangers. <\/p>\n

Google DeepMind\u2019s chief AI readiness officer, Lila Ibrahim, even signed a 2023 statement declaring that mitigating the risk of human extinction from AI should be treated as seriously as nuclear war\u2014and now she\u2019s revealing just how likely she thinks that doomsday scenario actually is.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not zero,\u201d Ibrahim told Fortune. \u201cAnything beyond that is just me guessing\u2026 that\u2019s the engineer in me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although three years have passed since Ibrahim signed the Center for AI Safety\u2019s statement<\/a>, alongside OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei, she said it would still \u201cbe irresponsible of us not to talk about existential risk.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called \u201cgodfather of AI,\u201d has put the odds of human extinction at 10% to 20%<\/a> within just three decades. Amodei said there\u2019s a 25% chance the future (i.e. our existence) will go \u201creally, really badly.<\/a>\u201d Even the late physicist Stephen Hawking\u2014who relied on AI to share his respected views with the world\u2014warned it could end mankind<\/a>, nearly a decade before ChatGPT came on the scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe two things that keep me up at night are: Are we doing everything we can to mitigate the risks? And are we doing everything we can to maximize the opportunity? Those two, in my mind, go hand in hand,\u201d Ibrahim said.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s first COO said the pandemic was a reminder catastrophic risks aren\u2019t always the ones you see coming\u2014and that businesses have a history of not talking enough about what could go wrong during previous waves of technology, like the rise of the internet and then social media. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t sit around the table when we were making investment decisions and talk about the risks in the way that we should have. Sometimes we can be so much in the here and now,\u201d Ibrahim said, adding we should instead be looking at apocalyptic science fiction Hollywood movies as cautionary tales.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we don\u2019t do anything to mitigate that or to invest in the good things along the way, then we\u2019re ending up exactly where we don\u2019t want to go,\u201d she added. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of things that could go wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elon Musk says money won\u2019t matter by 2036. Ibrahim says nobody actually knows that either<\/p>\n

If Ibrahim is cautious about putting an exact percentage prediction to how likely it is AI will result in humanity\u2019s downfall, she\u2019s equally skeptical of the other extreme: a post-scarcity paradise.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Musk has repeatedly floated a future in which AI and robots produce so much abundance that work becomes optional, and wages become irrelevant<\/a>. And he even recently put a 10-year deadline on robots taking over the workplace and making salaries obsolete.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoney won\u2019t matter in 2036,\u201d Musk just told The Economist<\/a>, adding goods will be so cheap we will enter an era of deflation and governments will dish out a universal high income to its citizens who have been freed from the daily grind of working.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Likewise, Amazon<\/a> founder Jeff Bezos has predicted that by 2045, \u201cmillions of people\u201d<\/a> will be living in space, with robots handling the daily commute\u2014since, in his vision, we\u2019ll be commuting to other planets rather than the office. And in less than 10 years\u2019 time, OpenAI\u2019s Altman says college graduates will be working \u201csome completely new, exciting, super well-paid<\/a>\u201d job in space.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Ibrahim isn\u2019t buying it. Despite having a front-row seat to AI\u2019s biggest breakthroughs at Google DeepMind\u2014an advanced AI lab dedicated to solving major scientific problems\u2014Ibrahim says the technology is moving too fast for anyone to know what comes next with any real accuracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we can really predict what a future state looks like,\u201d she told Fortune.<\/p>\n

Her focus, she said, is less about which planet we might be living on in two decades, and more about how these new technologies can practically be used to make the world we are currently living in a better place: solving concrete problems like extreme weather conditions and industrial waste, while making sure the benefits don\u2019t just flow to the handful of people running these powerful AI companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would rather we put our attention towards how we use technology as a tool to maximize human potential,\u201d Ibrahim said. \u201cThat\u2019s going to be where we need to be investing and spending our time\u2014having the debates around what are the diseases that we can solve by having this new tool that can find patterns that we as humans haven\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a lot about how we get to a future versus what the future is,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Elon Musk has consistently painted a utopian picture of AI\u2019s future, many other tech leaders and governments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[65559,5044,140,2264,132,7543,364,3842,65558,2821,6046,11604],"class_list":["post-131264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-and-wellness","tag-deepmind","tag-elon-musk","tag-fitness","tag-google","tag-google-deepmind","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-money","tag-personal-health","tag-the-future-of-work","tag-view-from-the-c-suite","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}