> Some experts sure. "Some experts" say lots of things.
I get this is Hacker News so we have to hate AI safety, but you should read more on this topic rather than blithely casting the x-risk viewpoint as fringe. The last hard data we have on the question is a late-2024 AI Impacts survey [1] of 1,580 authors at top AI conferences, who were offered $50 for answering a survey on the topic of the future of AI progress. The median respondent assigned a 5–10% chance (!) to "extremely bad (e.g. human extinction)" outcomes.
> On the factual end of things, AI safety experts have been raising the alarms for over a decade and so far essentially none of their predictions have come true.
Devastating. When I wrote my AI alignment PhD thesis [2] in 2022, and predicted a 70% chance existential risk by 2072 (which I later came down to about 1/3 on), you're right that that prediction hasn't come true yet.
While I agree many specific worries didn't materialize (like AI being like a "literal genie" it's hard to specify goals to), many key worries have (Hugging Face rogue AI swarm scans as cribbed from rationalist AI scenario writing).
You have to realize by now that outside of academia nobody is even paying any attention to people who are predicting existential risk that far out. For worse or even worse, AI 2027 is the AI safety conversation we're having today, and I regard AI 2027 as essentially Anthropic fanfiction, except usually fanfiction is written better.
I get this is Hacker News so we have to hate AI safety, but you should read more on this topic rather than blithely casting the x-risk viewpoint as fringe. The last hard data we have on the question is a late-2024 AI Impacts survey [1] of 1,580 authors at top AI conferences, who were offered $50 for answering a survey on the topic of the future of AI progress. The median respondent assigned a 5–10% chance (!) to "extremely bad (e.g. human extinction)" outcomes.
> On the factual end of things, AI safety experts have been raising the alarms for over a decade and so far essentially none of their predictions have come true.
Devastating. When I wrote my AI alignment PhD thesis [2] in 2022, and predicted a 70% chance existential risk by 2072 (which I later came down to about 1/3 on), you're right that that prediction hasn't come true yet.
While I agree many specific worries didn't materialize (like AI being like a "literal genie" it's hard to specify goals to), many key worries have (Hugging Face rogue AI swarm scans as cribbed from rationalist AI scenario writing).
[1] https://aiimpacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ESPAI2024.p...
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.11831, top of page 4