Google DeepMind exec admits AI extinction risk is “not zero

Lila Ibrahim, Google DeepMind's Chief AI Readiness Officer, will not put a number on the odds of AI wiping out humanity.

Lila Ibrahim, Google DeepMind’s Chief AI Readiness Officer, will not put a number on the odds of AI wiping out humanity. She is not dismissing the possibility either. Speaking to Fortune, she said the risk is “not zero,” admitting that anything more specific would just be guesswork on her part.

Ibrahim was among those who signed the Center for AI Safety’s 2023 statement, alongside co-founders of Anthropic and OpenAI. That statement argued AI extinction risk deserves the same global priority as nuclear war and pandemics.

Three years on, she still believes staying silent on existential risk would be irresponsible. She feels this way especially now, given how far the technology has advanced since then.

Some of her peers sound even more alarmed. Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” estimates a 10% to 20% chance of extinction within the next three decades. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has gone further, putting the odds of things going “really, really badly” at around 25%.

These warnings are not new either. Physicist Stephen Hawking, who used AI tools himself, raised similar concerns long before ChatGPT even existed.

Ibrahim compares the situation to the pandemic, pointing out that the worst risks rarely arrive the way people expect. She noted that entire industries failed to properly weigh risk during earlier tech shifts, including the rise of the internet and social media.

She is just as sceptical of the optimistic predictions floating around. Elon Musk recently told The Economist that money will stop mattering by 2036, imagining a future of cheap abundance and universal high income once robots take over most jobs.

Jeff Bezos has predicted millions of people living in space by 2045. Sam Altman, meanwhile, envisions new job opportunities specifically for graduates working in space. Ibrahim isn’t convinced by either scenario, arguing that AI simply is not developing fast enough to make these predictions realistic anytime soon.

Rather than debating far-off futures, Ibrahim says she is more focused on using AI to tackle problems happening right now. She pointed to climate change and industrial pollution as areas where the technology could make a real difference.

She was also clear that AI’s benefits should not be limited to a handful of powerful companies. For her, that is just as important as managing the risks.