(KRON) -- A former Google AI safety expert is so confident artificial intelligence will destroy humanity he says he's stopped saving for retirement. Nate Soares worked at Google and Microsoft, spending more than 12 years working on AI alignment.
Currently, he is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit dedicated to identifying and mitigating the risks of AI. He is also the author of the book, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies," which warns of the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
Speaking on an episode of the "The Most Interesting Thing in AI" podcast, Soares said that he stopped saving for retirement a decade ago.
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"I do not save for retirement now," Soares told host Nicholas Thompson. "I have a 401K from when I worked at Google, but I haven't contributed to it for like a decade."
"I guess right now it looks like we probably don't have a decade on the clock," Soares continued, adding that it's "More than 50% that we don't have a decade at this point."
One scenario Soares floated is that humans will die out when AI harvests the energy of the sun.
"We should expect the AIs to be harvesting the sun," he continued, adding, "Once the AI has built the rockets and sent up the probes that are sort of somehow harvesting all the sun's energy, humans don't survive that."
"It would take a lot of extra work to harvest the sun's energy while leaving enough sunlight falling on the planet for humans to survive," Soares said.
In Soares view, AI could also take a more direct approach to wiping out humanity.
"I think if the AI doesn't care enough about us to kill us, then we die when it harvests the energy of the sun," he said. "But it also might care about us enough to kill us. It might be like, 'Well, I don't want the humans launching the nukes or making these other competitor AIs, so here's a supervirus that kills most of you, but maybe not the people that are in the submarines or uncontacted tribes."
But despite his grim view, Soares told the host there is still time to prevent the AI apocalype.
"I do everything I can to top this eventuality he said. "I don't think it's inevitable."
