In the troubling view of machine learning researcher Nate Soares, AI is more likely than not to wipe out humanity within the next decade.
At least, that’s what Soares said during a recent episode of the Atlantic’s podcast “The Most Interesting Thing in AI.” During the taping, the AI researcher and president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute even said that he’s so confident in the coming AI apocalypse that he’s stopped contributing to his retirement account.
“I do not save for retirement right now,” Soares explained during the interview. “I have a 401(k) from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed for a decade.”
The AI guru evidently pegs the possibility of AI-driven extinction at over 50 percent over the next ten years, a remarkably bold prediction of a future which Soares is evidently working hard to prevent.

