Extremely Bad Outcome According to a new survey that took into account the input from 2,778 researchers, there’s a not insignificant risk of artificial intelligence triggering human extinction. Just over half of the AI researchers surveyed say there’s a five percent chance of humans will be driven to extinction, among other “extremely bad outcomes.” Ten percent of respondents, for instance, said it’s possible machines could outperform humans in “every possible task” by 2027. Half of the respondents said that’d be possible by 2047. But it’s not all doom and gloom: 68.3 percent of respondents said that “good outcomes from superhuman AI” are more likely than bad ones. Most of all, the survey highlights the sheer amount of disagreement and uncertainty among researchers, with broad disagreement about whether progress should be sped up or slowed down. Numbers Game The five percent figure is nonetheless telling, noting a significant perceived danger. “It’s an important signal that most AI researchers don’t find it strongly implausible that advanced AI destroys humanity,” author Katja Grace at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California, told New Scientist. “I think this general belief in a non-minuscule risk is much more telling than the exact percentage risk.” As the survey notes, “forecasting is difficult in general, and subject-matter experts have been observed to perform poorly.” “Our participants’ expertise is in AI, and they do not, to our knowledge, have any unusual skill at forecasting in general,” the paper continues. Educated Guesses But that doesn’t mean their word should be…Scientists Say This Is the Probability AI Will Drive Humans Extinct