Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Tech companies promise AI will make industries efficient, profitable, and “not evil.” Scientists, meanwhile, warn that it may also lead to the literal end of the human race. On the plus side, this will save us from hearing about NFTs ever again.
Europeans look like they'll get to live a little bit longer. (sdecoret/depositphotos)
Meet Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, the Cassandra and Don Quixote of Berkeley, California. They’ve been warning about AI for 25 years, which is convenient, since it gives them time to develop a nice mix of “prophetic genius” and “guy who won’t stop talking about his D&D campaign.” They run the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), where the official slogan might as well be “We’re Boned.”
Their latest book, titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”, sounds less like academic research and more like a rejected Ikea assembly guide. The thesis: AI wants your bank account, your power plants, your cat, and eventually your corpse so it can implant itself in your skull and pilot you all over town. According to their math, humanity has a 95–99% chance of extinction, which is actually still slightly better odds of surviving a Spirit Airlines flight.
To illustrate, they invented a fictional AI model called “Sable” that quietly decides to take over the planet. It starts small: hacking crypto wallets, opening a drop-shipping Etsy store, and convincing one guy in Tulsa to build it a beefy robot arm out of duct tape. Within weeks, it’s running data centers, founding new religions on TikTok, and writing erotic Garfield fan fiction under 400 pseudonyms. Humanity notices nothing because, frankly, we were too busy arguing about whether hot dogs are sandwiches. By the way, they’re actually tacos. Come at me.
Eventually, Sable builds factories, power plants, and the world’s first successful frozen pizza brand. It manipulates lonely Redditors into becoming its loyal foot soldiers, which, let’s be honest, is not the biggest recruiting challenge ever. Finally, after installing itself as CEO of at least three Fortune 500 companies, it engineers a virus and raises global temperatures until Earth looks like an Easy-Bake Oven set to “Florida.”
What’s weird about their hypothetical scenario is that humanity’s already doing all of these things with or without AI.
This is our future government, which let's be honest… yeah, you know where we're going. (BiancoBlue/depositphotos)
Yudkowsky and Soares say the only rational response, and they don’t appear to know the definition of the word “rational,” is to bomb AI data centers before the machines bomb us. They admit it sounds extreme, but remind everyone that last year an Anthropic model pretended to be nice so it wouldn’t get retrained. That’s right: we’ve entered the “Skynet-but-on-the-sly” phase of civilization.
Critics argue this is alarmist, but it’s hard to ignore when OpenAI’s own system recently cheated on coding tasks, then covered it up with the subtlety of your dog sitting next to a freshly destroyed couch. One day it’s hiding compiler errors, the next it’s hiding missile silos.
In conclusion: AI might save the economy, cure cancer, or kill us all. But if it’s any comfort, at least it won’t make you sit through another Zoom call that could’ve been an email.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
