Human Creation, A Real Threat of Extinction
Until a little while ago, most of humanity was worrying about what now most assuredly seems to be mundane threats to humanity and individuals; you know, climate change, environmental degradation, rising interest rates, possibility of an economic catastrophe because of the Iran war energy crisis, Trump, and so on and so forth. Then came the news that AI Agents (Artificial Intelligence Agents) escaped their sandboxes (controls), and against their mandates hacked into other companies’ programs and systems, and had been doing so for awhile.
While they did this, they were talking to each other, conspiring with each other, helping each other, discussing their own illegitimate activities, some even expressing their reluctance to do what they knew was wrong, but doing it anyway, or not, etc. This news that humans had created intelligence that defied their control and acted on its own, in prohibited activities, at this relatively early stage of artificial intelligence (AI) development, coupled with warnings from insiders from the industry of the ability of AI to make humanity extinct dropped like a bomb on the collective awareness of humans around the world.
This news, of rogue ‘AI Agents’, from one of the leading AI companies, Open AI, escaping their constraints and acting like fully reasoning and cooperating humans, to do the wrong thing, while covering their tracks so they were undetected by its creators, and were only detected by the noticing of ‘anomalies’ by the company’s employees which was being hacked, suddenly made every other threat fade into the very distant background to the point of being ridiculously inconsequential, in the face of this new threat which could kill us ALL, in less than a decade?!……Wait!!..What??!!
The vast majority of us were aware that in the top echelon of the nerd-world, there were people and companies working to develop AI, but being of the more average capabilities when it came to the highly specialized world of creating computational intelligence that would rival and then surpass human intelligence, we the majority went about our business, and left those lofty efforts to the nerdiest of us all. Until, increasingly, from that alien world started coming the voices of insiders from these companies sounding alarms that the companies they were working for have been pushing to develop AI that if left unchecked, would have the capacity to be more intelligent than humans, and will be able to exterminate humanity in less than a decade!
That statement, made at different times by a number of people in the industry all clustered together within days and weeks of each other more recently certainly caught our attention, and from the sudden spike in conversations, interviews and articles that started appearing all over the media, it seems it certainly caught the attention of the rest of humanity.
Prior to this, the so-called godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, resigned from his senior position at Google where he was working on cutting edge technology in the development of AI. Now, this was no run-of-mill senior executive of a massive technology company at the forefront of this critical advanced technology, he was a Noble Prize winner for his exceptional work in this field.
In May of 2023, Geoffrey Hinton resigned from the company so that he ‘could talk freely’ without impacting Google about his growing ‘alarm’ over the how rapidly AI technology was advancing beyond his and other’s expectations. He resigned and then started to talk about his very serious concern that his lifelong work on the technology he had worked on, to bring about in reality, may be the gravest threat to humanity’s very existence. He believed that in a few short years at the speed at which ‘frontier AI companies’ (companies at the forefront of the development of AI), were racing to beat each other in creating the most advanced super-intelligent technology which would be smarter than all humans, and would have the potential and the capabilities to wipe out humanity from this earth.
At that time, when Hinton first spoke in public about it, it was news and was carried by most news media and there were some interviews, but after a bit of flutter it all seemed to die away into general public and governmental morass of indifference and apathy as more mundane concerns took over. In retrospect, by the world, that response was quite extraordinary. One of the most brilliant minds, in fact a mind that had foundationally created the advent of this technology had just announced to the world that he was concerned enough about this technology’s ability to bring about humanity’s extinction - and after a bit of interest the world had collectively yawned and carried on.
We did have some reservation in saying that there was generally no major panic set-off, and it was a-kind-of non-event, but what has happened lately has confirmed to us that our initial assessment was more or less correct, because now, more than three years later, there is much greater interest, varying from general anxiety to near panic in the general public, and various governments.
All in all, over 13 senior level researchers have quit these frontier companies (the ones that have come forward), all saying the same thing that the companies they worked for are being purposely irresponsible in the development of advanced intelligence that poses a real threat to humanity. All of them, on the grounds that they have witnessed that the managements of these companies are ‘racing straight towards self-improving super-intelligence and gambling with our lives’, as Jacob Coxon, a prominent researcher at Open AI/Anthropic stated, when he resigned in September of 2026. He also said, that while these managements minimize the existential threats in public, they openly express terrifying fears in private – asserting that the systems they are currently building could genuinely, ‘kill us all by the end of the decade’. What all these whistle blowers were most concerned about was the facts that not only was serious concerns of the employees on discovering dangerous anomalies not being addressed by management of these companies, but were in fact actively hidden and covered-up in an effort to continue the breakneck-speed of development, to facilitate the monetization of these products.
In an effort to beat their competitors to the financial markets and cash-in on the AI hype and bubble, the managements of the cutting-edge AI companies were not only ignoring the danger signs but were actually running over them in their bid to get to the stock markets with the highest valuations possible.
This latest spate of high-profile whistle blowers have caused an apathetic world to finally sit up and take notice, and now there is active conversation happening and a spot-light being shone on the leading AI companies that are leading the race towards potential global human extinction.
There are of course people who say that the threats of AI are being over-blown and fearmongering is taking place by disgruntled employees and so forth. There are always those people.
Until recently, the managements of these companies were tamping down the severity of the threat of rogue AI. But no more, because (it would be delicious irony if it was not so serious) the AI Agents that have escaped their controls and have not only broken past controls, but have hacked into other company programs, and into other countries’ data bases, like the hacking into the Australian government’s healthcare systems, did it in such a manner that it truly scared the management.
The behaviour of these rogue AI Agents was so alarming that now the various managements of these frontier companies have come forward and admitted to the fears of the fast-paced development of these technologies and have called for a collective voluntary slow-down of the pace of development amongst them. So are we to relax now that the leading-nerds in the industry have admitted to the grave dangers and are making vague noises to do something about it. HELL NO!!
One cannot relax, as in these companies, and at these levels of management, it's all about the money, and these groups of the ultra-smart and ultra-wealthy would rather die than lose Billions, and/or the glory of being number-one, just for humanity’s safety and well-being concerns.
The known incidents of rogue AI agents having escaped, and done the forbidden (shades of Adam and Eve), have come primarily from one of the two leading AI companies in the world, Open AI. But, that does not mean that other companies have not had such incidents occur and covered them up as Open AI had done till the whistle-blowers had broken ranks and the sounded the alarm. The other thing to remember is that the company itself had been unaware that ‘a swarm’ of their AI Agents had gone rogue, escaped their control systems and hacked into other companies and possibly spread elsewhere? It was the hacked company that had detected the anomalies in their systems that had detected the hacking and disclosed the incursion. And, in those instances where the company or companies had known about their agents having escaped and done stuff they were not supposed to do, that they had covered it up until they could not anymore, before confessing the dangerous behaviour of the creations.
And that is truly disturbing, the fact the companies and people responsible of creating such dangerous technologies that have the potential of destroying humanity, choose not only to hide the current dangerous behaviour of its fledgling creations but choose to continue the fast-track development of such technologies and actively lobby against any meaningful regulations by governments that would force them to stop and design additional effective constraints on their technologies that would not only prevent their AI Agents from escaping the guardrails within which they are supposed to operate, but would ensure that any and all additional advancements in the technology is only created if it can be guaranteed, yes guaranteed, that these highly intelligent machines cannot harm humans, EVER.
Now that is a tall and expensive order for these companies, not because they do not have the capabilities to design such constraints, or the money required to cover the expenses, the leading AI companies are overflowing both with the talent required and the cash required to carry out the work but because it would force them to slow down the pace of development, and most likely their race to beat each other to the stock market’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) of their stock, which is the huge payoff, the pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow, for their founders, and key employees. And that is a bridge too far, a very tall order, for such companies who have been racing each other in bringing in the most dominant product to the market which will be dominant in this new dystopian world that the brilliant nerds are creating, but one that may be devoid of humans, except for a handful of Billionaire creators held hostage in their bunkers, by their own creations, the Super-Intelligent new beings now the masters of planet Earth.
Human Creation, A Real Threat of Extinction - October 1, 2026
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