The first time we converse, Joep Meindertsma is just not in a superb place. He tears up as he describes a dialog wherein he warned his niece concerning the threat of synthetic intelligence inflicting societal collapse. Afterward, she had a panic assault. “I cry every other day,” he says, talking over Zoom from his dwelling within the Dutch metropolis of Utrecht. “Every time I say goodbye to my parents or friends, it feels like it could be the last time.”

Meindertsma, who’s 31 and co-owns a database firm, has been interested by AI for a few years. But he actually began worrying concerning the risk the expertise may pose to humanity when Open AI launched its newest language mannequin, GPT-4, in March. Since then, he has watched the runaway success of ChatGPT chatbot—based mostly first on GPT-3 then GPT-4—reveal to the world how far AI has progressed and Big Tech firms race to catch up. And he has seen pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, warn of the hazards related to the techniques they helped create. “AI capabilities are advancing far more rapidly than virtually anyone has predicted,” says Meindertsma. “We are risking social collapse. We’re risking human extinction.”

One month earlier than our discuss, Meindertsma stopped going to work. He had turn out to be so consumed by the concept AI goes to destroy human civilization that he was struggling to consider anything. He needed to do one thing, he felt, to avert catastrophe. Soon after, he launched Pause AI, a grassroots protest group that campaigns for, as its identify suggests, a halt to the event of AI. And since then, he has amassed a small band of followers who’ve held protests in Brussels, London, San Francisco and Melbourne. These demonstrations have been small—fewer than 10 individuals every time—however Meindertsma has been making buddies in excessive locations. Already, he says, he has been invited to talk with officers inside each the Dutch Parliament and on the European Commission.

The concept that AI may wipe out humanity sounds excessive. But it’s an concept that’s gaining traction in each the tech sector and in mainstream politics. Hinton give up his function at Google in May and launched into a world spherical of interviews wherein he raised the specter of people not with the ability to management AI because the expertise advances. That identical month, business leaders—together with the CEOs of AI labs Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic—signed a letter acknowledging the “risk of extinction,” and UK prime minister Rishi Sunak grew to become the primary head of presidency to publicly admit he additionally believes that AI poses an existential threat to humanity.

Meindertsma and his followers supply a glimpse of how these warnings are trickling by means of society, creating a brand new phenomenon of AI anxiousness and giving a youthful technology—lots of whom are already deeply frightened about local weather change—a brand new cause to really feel panic concerning the future. A survey by the pollster YouGov discovered that the proportion of individuals frightened that synthetic intelligence would result in an apocalypse rose sharply within the final 12 months. Hinton denies he needs AI improvement to be stopped, briefly or indefinitely. But his public statements, concerning the threat AI poses to humanity, have resulted in a bunch of younger individuals who really feel there is no such thing as a different selection.

To totally different individuals, “existential risk” means various things. “The main scenario I’m personally worried about is social collapse due to large-scale hacking,” says Meindertsma, explaining he’s involved about AI getting used to create low cost and accessible cyber weapons that might be utilized by criminals to “effectively take out the entire internet.” This is a state of affairs specialists say is extraordinarily unlikely. But Meindertsma nonetheless worries concerning the resilience of banking and meals distribution providers. “People will not be able to find food in a city. People will fight,” he says. “Many billions I think will die.”