If AI kills us, don't blame the machine - Salon.com

摘要: commentary

If AI kills us, don’t blame the machine

AI companies warn about the risk their models pose. Should it be on them to handle it?

正文

commentary

If AI kills us, don’t blame the machine

AI companies warn about the risk their models pose. Should it be on them to handle it?

Alex Galbraith

Senior Writer

Published

September 12, 2026 6:30AM (EDT)

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Silicon Valley's warnings of A.I.-induced doom (Getty Images)

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Imagine a stopped cable car sitting at the top of a steep hill in San Francisco. There’s a switch just below the car that would send the trolley onto one of two tracks. You don’t know where either track goes beyond the bottom of the hill, and you can’t see whether either track is obstructed. You’re also unsure of the tracks’ condition. The conductor is nowhere in sight. Do you release the brakes? And can anyone be mad at you if you do?

The answer is obvious. Of course you wouldn’t. Releasing a hurtling hunk of metal without knowing where it would go and what would happen is too likely to cause harm. The risk outweighs the reward of seeing the car go really fast.

But inside the brain trusts of Silicon Valley, billions of investor dollars and years of tortured rationalist arguments are clouding a similar argument about

artificial intelligence

. A.I. company CEOs, employee whistleblowers and industry boosters can’t stop crowing about the dangers posed by the products they’re rushing to create.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has

that large-language models could be “more dangerous than nukes.” Speaking at a G20 summit in North Carolina earlier this month, he

about the disastrous effect A.I. agents could have on cybersecurity, warning that the rapid pace of large language model (LLM) development could cause things to go “very wrong very quickly.”

“Local control” of data centers is a Big Tech con

Altman is not alone in his fears. Here’s Anthropic, the A.I. corporation currently

at war with the Pentagon

and the Trump administration, in a

blog post

around about their Claude Mythos model:

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