Altman to humanity: Accept some bad things to get benefits of AI

The leader of the most visible company hawking the future of artificial intelligence (AI), Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told Politico a little over a week ago that "the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology." Let me provide additional context. Previously Altman has said the following:

1. "It is terrifying because of the power that superintelligent AGI wields to destroy human civilization, intentionally or unintentionally." -- Lex Fridman Podcast #367 (March 25, 2023)

2. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." -- Center for AI Safety statement (No date)

3. "I was very intent on not destroying the world before having kids." -- Vanity Fair interview (October 5, 2026)

I do not know for a fact that AI can destroy civilization, and I'm not sure exactly what Sam Altman means when he says that. But I do know one very important thing that bears repeating again and again: Any product or system that has a nonzero chance of destroying all of human civilization should be abandoned. There is no amount of benefit that can justify risking the destruction of the entire human project no matter how small the risk.

This principle, of course, has been regularly violated by human society in the modern industrial era. We have built enough nuclear weapons to destroy us in the resulting nuclear winter. We are engaging in an uncontrolled experiment in the environment with genetically engineered crops. Their failure could have catastrophic effects on food supply. Their unmodeled effects on the environment could lead to unforeseen cascades that could have severe consequences. And, of course, climate change is the manifestation of our uncontrolled experiment with the burning of fossil fuels and with our vast changes in land use which have unleashed vast amounts of heating-trapping carbon into the atmosphere.

So, who thinks there is a nonzero chance that AI could destroy human civilization? Well, lots of people as is evidenced by the signatories to the Center for AI Safety statement linked above, many of whom work in the AI industry. And, Sam Altman uses the word "nonzero" in his recent interview with Vanity Fair (linked above) regarding the risk of civilizational collapse.

The apologists for technologies that threaten all of civilization typically point to the fact that humans are still around despite those technologies. That's like saying that you've been smoking for 40 years and you never once got cancer. These apologists also like to say that the probability of such a wipe-out is very small.

Here it is essential to understand what happens when you do something that has even a very small chance of producing catastrophe, and you iterate it again and again well into the future. You make it almost certain that the catastrophe will occur because that small chance becomes a big chance if you repeat the steps that could lead to catastrophe repeatedly with no intention of stopping. The world's nuclear powers are not dismantling all their nuclear weapons. The agricultural seed giants are not putting any limit on the number of genetically engineered crops they will design. And, of course, we are doing very little to avert the catastrophic outcomes of climate change (which could include dramatic declines in crop yields due to drought, heat, and flooding depending on where the crops are grown).

I believe that the current version of AI based on what are called Large Language Models has far fewer benefits than the industry is touting which keeps leaning on what AI supposedly will do, not what it can do now. For a thorough takedown of AI's supposed benefits, I recommend keeping up with journalist Ed Zitron.

But even if AI were to end up having all the benefits the industry is touting, it simply cannot be justified if continuing to use it will risk the entirety of civilization. Implied in Sam Altman's so-called risk/benefit analysis is that AI would continue to be used far into the future—until, of course, we destroy ourselves. One analogy I've used to understand this risk is Russian roulette:

Now imagine we are playing Russian roulette using a gun with 100 chambers in which only one bullet has been loaded. If we pull the trigger one or twice, there is indeed a very small chance that we will kill ourselves. But, if we place the gun to our heads and pull the trigger 100 times, we will almost certainly perish.

The risk could be one a million or one in a billion or even one in a trillion and the analogy would still hold. And, if you think about the number of operations AI systems around the world can perform, we could bring on disaster rather quickly. Remember: If you keep repeating something that has a nonzero chance of producing catastrophe, you will eventually produce catastrophe. If Sam Altman is right, that is where we must head if we want the so-called benefits of this technology.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.