I'd preach caution in believing the gravity of the story. Why?

1. Coxon sounds like he has issues. He left OpenAI out of safety concerns too, joined Anthropic, found himself in a panic echo chamber. Went on to study poetry. He must feel extremely powerless because studying poetry in the face of annihilation means you fully resign to your perceived fate.
2. The >10% was mentioned by senior leadership at Anthropic. "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade". That's exactly that echo chamber talking to you, you're seeing the LARP flowing out of there. But his disclaimer posted in the followup underneath: "I think the risk from present models is low". So no one said "LLMs like Claude or GPT are going to kill us all". I think that this is important.
3. I think on the part of the media, this is Agenda-setting theory.
   • Media needs to sell clicks. Well... they sure as hell got clicks.
   • The most prominent politician to race their opinion on the issue was a democratic 2028 candidate. Don't believe their lies.
   • Doomers will ride this all the way.

I kind of said the same about Covid in Jan 2020. What I got right is that this entire thing was seeded with lies, special interests, blame shifting, geopolitical bullshit. What I got wrong is that it still spread the world. It didn't kill everyone though.

So to learn from my own mistake about underestimating Covid, immediately after preaching caution, I'd turn it into a hardening exercise: "What can we do to mitigate this risk, on the off-chance that something does happen?".

the killing stuff doesn’t make sense to me, we could always introduce blade runners to take care of them, i think there’s more of a >60% chance AI just forces some kind of reset of the global financial system, might be the only crazy thing it does in my lifetime

Say "Yes, dear. Mm hmm, dear. You're absolutely right, dear".

I've recently come to realize these kinds of beliefs are more widespread than I thought, after someone pointed me to the r/antiai subreddit^[1][2]. Don't let her go there; it's only gonna reinforce those beliefs seeded by fear rather than reason. I'm not saying there isn't truth in it, but echo chambers are dangerous places...

1. Just a random quick example ↩

2. There must be some overlap with the Buttcoin people on this subreddit ↩

Yes :)

AI has already started doing it. We use our brains less and less for thinking; I would say that is the first step.

I don’t even know how AI would kill anyone.

Tell her she is half right: AI will only kill women and children, the men will be spared

As Ludwig von Mises said of nuclear weapons, "The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest."

The spear, the musket, and the laser are merely the cosmetic trappings of sufferings through the ages. Let us pray before facing the imminent robot-zombie horde, as we prepare to follow the example of our ancestors and set a new one for our descendants.

Tell her it's true and she should always listen to you! :-)

Imagine spending years building AI, only to realize your wife is the one asking the most important safety questions lol :)

My answer would be a question: Have you seen the **Terminator** movie?

Of course AI will try to destroy us, but humility will prevail—though I do have my doubts about humanity, given that the next generation is now dedicated to *"farming aura."*

Yes and the only way to prevent it is to stack more sats.

Listen to what Edward Dowd has to say on this. He was really insightful on covid.

https://eddowdbeyondthenarrative.substack.com/p/the-post-labor-day-ai-panic-psyop?r=12542m

Summary - it's an organized campaign to institute government controls and regulation on AI. The viral nature of the original push was completely non-organic. It's a psy-op.

Here's some excerpts:

The X account @hilbertspaess had almost no footprint before Tuesday night. The bio is two words: “ai research.” The account sat there for a year. Then, in one coordinated burst, a seven-post thread announcing a resignation from Anthropic, a warning that the labs are “gambling with our lives,” and a prediction that the people building this stuff privately believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Overnight the post printed nine figures in views. Hundreds of thousands of likes. The account went from nobody to a household handle before most of the country had coffee.

That is not how organic X speech works: organic speech stumbles, it posts a draft, it deletes a typo and it has a history. This account had a history of silence, then a professionally punchy script, then the entire mainstream media stack that ran with it with hours of post.

The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive interview with Coxon very shortly after the post went live. Business Insider, Newsweek, the New York Post, Mashable, and Deadline, all ran the same quotes within hours. Then the next day live interviews on Fox News and CNN. That is not one reporter getting lucky on a late night scroll. That is a package. In my humble opinion you do not get a WSJ exclusive and a 100 million view thread by accident unless the interview was already in the can.

Then I did what I always do. I read the replies and skeptics on X. The anomaly hunters got there first. Parker Thayer laid out the timeline that made my former equity portfolio manager brain activate: the Journal piece “potentially” landing before the public post, an account with no prior engagement suddenly exploding, and the first quote posts arriving inside fifteen minutes from policy shops whose funding traces back to the same circle of Anthropic-adjacent philanthropy. Other users pointed at the empty follower graph, the sudden verification, the fact that the first amplifiers were not random citizens but people whose job is to turn fear into statutes and accusations of links to AI policy NGOs.

You can argue with any one of those dots. It is harder to argue with the cluster.

Then ask the only question that ever matters: Who benefits?

Let us start with who does not benefit:

· Not the open-source shops

· Not the startups that cannot afford a compliance department and a containment audit

· Not the Chinese labs, who will ignore the sermon and keep training regardless

The first beneficiaries are the two names in the original post: Anthropic and OpenAI.

They are burning cash at a rate that would make a 2000-2001 CLEC blush. Token prices keep falling. Enterprise demand is not doubling fast enough to offset it. The second derivative is slowing. Capex is a black hole. Valuations only work if the story stays vertical and the competitive set stays small. A federal moat with pre-certification, insurance mandates, criminal liability for unlicensed models does two things at once. It crushes the long tail of competitors who were eating their margins. And it gives the incumbents a political story to take to investors: “we are the responsible adults, the regulated utilities of intelligence, please keep funding the losses until the unit economics appear.”

Tell her its just scare tactics from the AI Godkings cartel in their sly strategy of milking the petrodollar empire of its last remaining fiat debt capital issuance capacity, before China takes over.