AI doomsday fears prompt researcher to abandon retirement savings

Former Google engineer Nate Soares believes there is a greater-than-even chance the technology could wipe out humanity within a decade An AI safety researcher has stopped saving for retirement because he believes artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within the next ten years. His warning follows similar predictions from researchers concerned that increasingly powerful systems could escape human control.Nate Soares, a former Google and Microsoft engineer who now heads the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), discussed his outlook with Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson“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,” he said, referring to his workplace retirement account.Asked whether he believed there was a greater-than-50% chance humans would not survive another ten years, Soares stated that it’s “more than 50% that we don’t have a decade at this point.” “I am not really an AI job apocalypse guy,” he said. “I’m an AI kills all humans guy.”Soares argued that a sufficiently capable system could develop goals incompatible with human survival, evade oversight, and improve itself. It could t...