Will AI kill humans in 10 years? Ex-Google Engineer predicts 'more than 50%' chance of extinction. 'I do not save for retirement'

Saving for retirement usually means planning for a future that is decades away. But Nate Soares, a former Google engineer who now leads an organisation focused on AI safety, is not really convinced humanity has that much time left. He believes that artificial intelligence could wipe out the human race within the next decade, and he takes his prediction so seriously that he has stopped putting money into his retirement savings.

“I do not save for retirement right now. I have a 401(k) from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed for a decade,” Soares told The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson in an interview for his series The Most Interesting Thing in AI.

When asked about the possibility of humans not being around in the next 10 years, Soares replied, “More than 50% that we don’t have a decade at this point is how it looks to me.”

Why AI could threaten humanity

Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a Berkeley-based nonprofit that studies the risks associated with advanced AI. He left Google in 2014 and has spent more than 12 years working on AI alignment, which aims to ensure that AI systems behave as their creators intend.

The reason Soares is worried is that if AI becomes significantly more intelligent than humans then it might set goals that conflict with human interests.

Over time, an AI system could also build the infrastructure needed to operate independently, potentially leaving humans unable to stop it.

Despite his grim prediction, Soares does not believe human extinction is unavoidable. “I do everything I can to stop this eventuality. I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he said.

Elon Musk’s AI prediction

Apart from Soares, Elon Musk has also questioned whether traditional retirement planning will make sense in an AI-driven future. Musk has also suggested that people may not need to worry about retirement savings in the coming decades.

However, the two see very different outcomes. Musk has predicted that advances in AI, robotics and energy could bring in an era of abundance, with cheaper goods and services, improved healthcare and what he has described as a “universal high income”.