{"id":56608,"date":"2026-05-31T05:33:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T05:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/56608\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T05:33:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T05:33:12","slug":"catastrophists-versus-accelerationists-will-ai-destroy-the-world-or-save-it-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/56608\/","title":{"rendered":"Catastrophists versus accelerationists: Will AI destroy the world or save it? | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eliezer Yudkowsky, 46, and Nate Soares, 37, are convinced that if artificial intelligence (AI) systems continue to improve, they will eventually surpass human capabilities<\/a>. And when that happens, humanity will go extinct. They argue this could occur in a matter of months or within a decade. The title of their latest book is blunt: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (Little, Brown & Co).<\/p>\n

Yudkowsky and Soares are two of the leading figures among the doomers, or catastrophists. Recent advances in generative AI<\/a> \u2014 the technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Sora \u2014 have sparked a heated debate inside the industry about the technology\u2019s potential. Distinct schools of thought have emerged. Doomers believe that once AI is sufficiently developed it will take the reins and decide to end civilization<\/a>. For that reason, they recommend that states sign international treaties to curb AI\u2019s advance, in the same way nuclear proliferation was limited during the Cold War.<\/p>\n

In early 2023, an open letter signed by hundreds of AI researchers called for a six-month moratorium on research. \u201cWe signed it too, although we considered it far too short,\u201d they write. So short, Yudkowsky wrote in an article published around that time in Time magazine<\/a>, that each country\u2019s allowed computing power should be limited and those who violate such limits should have their data centers \u201cdestroyed by air strike.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the other extreme are the boosters, or accelerationists, who take the opposite view: the development of superintelligence (the hypothetical intelligence that would surpass human intelligence) should be pursued because it will solve many of society\u2019s problems. It will cure diseases, increase efficiency across processes, and help us work less. It will make us happier.<\/p>\n

Doomers<\/p>\n

There are prominent names associated with both currents. The doomers, precisely because they invoke the apocalypse, have greater traction in the U.S. media and internationally. Their movement carries the seal of respectability that comes from having Turing Award winners \u2014 considered the Nobel Prize of computing \u2014 among its defenders, such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton<\/a>, the latter also a Nobel laureate in physics. The fact that two of the fathers of machine learning, the technique that enabled AI\u2019s major recent leap in capabilities, now oppose the technology they helped develop is used in Yudkowsky and Soares\u2019 book as a weighty argument in favor of their position.<\/p>\n

\"NateNate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, authors of the book ‘If Anyone Builds It, We All Die.’Studio B Portraits<\/p>\n

Another Turing Award winner and machine learning godfather, Yann LeCun<\/a>, disagrees. He has mocked the doomers on social media. \u201cWe will design their desires,\u201d he has said, for example. \u201cThe history of engineering is full of brilliant, eager optimists who dive headlong into new and fascinating problems that turn out to be infinitely harder than they expected,\u201d Yudkowsky and Soares reply in the book.<\/p>\n

This narrative is not confined to academia. Some entrepreneurs making AI possible have embraced similar rhetoric. Prominent among them is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who in May 2023 \u2014 months after the launch of ChatGPT \u2014 undertook a world tour with statespersons to showcase AI\u2019s benefits and warn of its dangers.<\/p>\n

Which of these two currents deserves more attention? It depends whom you ask. But sticking to the facts, both are equally detached from reality.<\/p>\n

Does synthetic intelligence exist?<\/p>\n

There is no scientific evidence that generative AI tools literally understand a given fragment of text. Yet, partly because of our own biases, people interpret a coherent response as evidence of intelligence. \u201cLanguage models only manipulate form; they imitate how people use language in many different contexts,\u201d linguist Emily Bender said in a recent interview with EL PA\u00cdS.<\/p>\n

\u201cMachines don\u2019t need to be intelligent in exactly the way humans are to be highly effective at predicting and steering the world,\u201d Soares says by email. \u201cAI developers are very good at improving machines every year. AI could be more effective than people because it can be faster than a human brain or operate with more complex cognitive algorithms,\u201d adds the former Google and Microsoft employee.<\/p>\n

That large language models can hold conversations with users, summarize texts, or solve mathematical problems may lead some to think they are intelligent or conscious. For now, however, they are programs that map patterns over enormous datasets. Why assume one of these programs could suddenly become conscious or pursue its own agenda? \u201cNo one knows whether AIs are conscious in the way humans are,\u201d Soares replies. \u201cThey are huge, complicated systems that were not developed carefully like traditional software; they don\u2019t follow instructions that were carefully programmed by humans. They are enormous trained entities that no one, not even their creators, understands,\u201d he adds, referring to the opacity surrounding deep learning (the process by which a system takes training data and forms patterns on its own). As for the possibility that AI will develop its own goals, Soares argues that this is already happening. He cites Moltbook, the social network of AI agents, though he omits that someone placed those agents there (and likely assigned them roles).<\/p>\n

Why would it want to kill us?<\/p>\n

The human brain is the product of evolution<\/a> and therefore carries built-in goals such as feeding, reproducing, and avoiding harm. Synthetic intelligence has not evolved, so it does not necessarily incorporate innate objectives. For some experts the question arises: can we ensure a potential intelligence will have goals that benefit us? That is the so-called alignment problem, a concept introduced by Soares and Yudkowsky in 2014.<\/p>\n

Soares believes the solution is to limit the development of AI that is \u201cbecoming smarter and smarter in ways no one understands.\u201d There is no need to eliminate large language models, self-driving cars, or AI that helps discover new drugs \u2014 only deep learning. \u201cWhen our leaders finally understand how dangerous a superintelligence could be, they will surely end this suicidal race. AI poses far more risk than we are willing to accept in any other industry,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But whether such a superintelligence could actually come into existence remains to be seen. For now, it is speculative. The majority opinion is that it is \u201cunlikely\u201d or \u201cvery unlikely\u201d we will see it, according to 76% of the 475 AI academics and professionals surveyed a year ago by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n

Two sides of the same coin<\/p>\n

Some entrepreneurs within the AI sector itself, such as Altman or Alex Karp, Palantir\u2019s CEO, also argue that AI could become immensely powerful \u2014 powerful enough to be a danger to society. The subtext is that because of that potential, investors should trust only the most capable companies (their own). And if the technology is so powerful, it would be foolish not to invest in it.<\/p>\n

Emily Bender and Alex Hanna argue in their book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech\u2019s Hype and Create the Future We Want, that AI catastrophists and accelerationists are two sides of the same coin. \u201cThose who love AI say that superintelligence is inevitable and will solve all our problems. And those who hate it say it\u2019s inevitable and will kill us all. Essentially the same thing, but with a different twist at the end,\u201d Bender told EL PA\u00cdS.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eliezer Yudkowsky, 46, and Nate Soares, 37, are convinced that if artificial intelligence (AI) systems continue to improve,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,580,132,320,157,361,370,8406],"class_list":["post-56608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-google","tag-microsoft","tag-openai","tag-palantir","tag-sam-altman","tag-sora"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56608","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=56608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}