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| Illustration: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images |
Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself? I fear not
Here in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we’ll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. “Welcome to the foothills of the singularity,” as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as “recursive self-improvement” – the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans.
As Robert Wright puts it in his book The God Test: “Never before has the near-term future … held such a wide array of not-implausible paths for humankind that would be so wildly transformative.” But will this be heaven or hell?... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/22/ai-disaster-hiroshima-humankind-silicon-valley-technology
