Jacob warns of AI killing humans, and did what PM Narendra Modi could not
Lenin, yes the same Lenin that immediately popped in your mind, once said: There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. If he were living in San Francisco in 2026, he might have said, “In here, every week decades happen.”
This is how the world of AI feels nowadays. The timelines that once felt decades away are now turning into a quick midnight scroll on X. Every midnight the world rushes on. At least that was what I felt this week as the world of AI kept exploding every day with one thing or other.
It started with OpenAI, Navier-Stokes, and all that drama involving some of the top mathematicians of the world. Then came Jacob and his warning of AI killing all humans. The pitch then rose, like Nessun Dorma sung by Luciano Pavarotti, culminating in Vincero! Vincero!, or in this case I will Win! I will Win! as expressed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in his another looong essay on Saturday night.
All of that. But first let’s talk about AI killing us all.
No kidding, we are all going to die due to AI. When? The answer depends on who you ask. Some say by the end of this decade. Some say AI will cause the extinction of humans by the end of next decade, around 7 years before Bharat is supposed to enter the list of viksit countries. Some, however, are more hopeful, because they believe AI is likely to end humans before George R R Martin can finish his novel Winds of Winter. That means we have forever.
There have been murmurs and quips from time to time, but the extinction talk this week started with Jacob. On September 8, Jacob Coxon, an engineer, made a thread on X that was subsequently seen by over 167 million people. “I resigned from Anthropic today,” he wrote. Then in the following posts he talked of how AI companies were racing to build AI systems that would eventually kill humans. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he said.
It did feel like a marketing stunt. That is until more people added to it. Some of them quite significant as far as the matters of AI safety go. Such as Anthropic safety lead Evan Hubinger, who put the threat in a statistical model. More than 10 per cent chance, he wrote on X, that AI kills humans “within the next decade.”
The posts were the sparks that lit a fire of litany, all praying and beseeching someone to do something about AI killing all humans. Some added their own sparks. An OpenAI engineer Marcus Williams upped the ante — and temperature of the fire — by calculating fresh odds of human extinction. Not 10 percent, he said, and not by the end of this decade. There is a 70 per cent chance that AI will kill all humans by the end of THIS decade.
X aka Twitter, which is where all this talk happens while the rest of the world eats its buttered toast and takes the subway to work, exploded. Soon more people joined in the debate. US and UK politicians talked of introducing laws that will slow down, or even shut down, AI development. The doomers realised it was their moment and, in unison, cried: we told you so. It truly felt, at least if you were active on the tech circle on X, that the world stood on the edge of the knife, wobbling and staring at the human extinction.
