As long as we have nuclear weapons, the job of ending humanity will continue to be as easy as the push of a button—or an AI agent hacking into a nuclear command-and-control system.
The revelation that artificial intelligence (AI) may pose an existential threat to humanity has hit the Internet and the airwaves like a storm, surprising some, and leading others to debate the merits of the claims or the intentions of the leaders and employees of AI companies who are sounding the alarm. It came as no surprise to me, as I received a lecture on this very topic from my 21-year-old son when I picked him up from college in May. How the tables had turned—not only was my son teaching me something I didn’t know a whole lot about, but he was doing it on the topic of existential threats, something that I do think about a lot.
What has surprised me over the past few weeks is the contrast between the amount of attention this previously underrecognized risk—real, perhaps, but still hypothetical—has received compared to an existential threat that we have been living with for decades, that of nuclear war. Moreover, even when elaborating on how exactly AI could eviscerate humanity, nuclear weapons are often not mentioned, though they would arguably be the easiest way by which current adventurous AI agents could stumble into destroying human civilization. A malicious superintelligent AI of the future might also find it simpler to start a nuclear war than to bother with other more complicated ways of killing us all.
Ever since the arrival of large language models in virtually every aspect of our lives with the release of the first ChatGPT version, …
Read the full article in The Nation HERE.
Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. Her research on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands has been covered widely, including by the Los Angeles Times. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
