Welcome to Slate Sundays, CryptoSlate’s new weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.
Would you take a drug that had a 25% chance of killing you?
Like a one-in-four possibility that rather than curing your ills or preventing diseases, you drop stone-cold dead on the floor instead?
That’s poorer odds than Russian Roulette.
Even if you are trigger-happy with your own life, would you risk taking the entire human race down with you?
The children, the babies, the future footprints of humanity for generations to come?
Thankfully, you wouldn’t be able to anyway, since such a reckless drug would never be allowed on the market in the first place.
Yet, this is not a hypothetical situation. It’s exactly what the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the world are doing right now.
No pills. No experimental medicine. Just an arms race at warp speed to the end of the world as we know it.
P(doom) circa 2030?
How long do we have left? That depends. Last year, 42% of CEOs surveyed at the Yale CEO Summit responded that AI had the potential to destroy humanity within five to 10 years.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei estimates a 10-25% chance of extinction (or “P(doom)” as it’s known in AI circles).
Unfortunately, his concerns are echoed industrywide, especially by a growing cohort of ex-Google and OpenAI employees, who elected to leave their fat paychecks behind to sound the alarm on the Frankenstein they helped create.
A 10-25% chance of extinction is an exorbitantly high level of risk for which there is no precedent.
For context, there is no permitted percentage for the risk of death from, say, vaccines or medicines. P(doom) must be vanishingly small; vaccine-associated fatalities are typically less than one in millions of doses (far lower than 0.0001%).
For historical context, during the development of the atomic bomb, scientists (including Edward Teller) uncovered a one in three million chance of starting a nuclear chain reaction that would destroy the earth. Time and resources were channeled toward further investigation.
Let me say that again.
One in three million.
Not one in 3,000. Not one in 300. And certainly not one in four.
How desensitized have we become that predictions like this don’t jolt humanity out of our slumber?
If ignorance is bliss, knowledge is an inconvenient guest
AI safety advocate at ControlAI, Max Winga, believes the problem isn’t one of apathy; it’s ignorance (and in this case, ignorance isn’t bliss).
Most people simply don’t know that the helpful chatbot that writes their work emails has a one in four chance of killing them as well. He says:
That’s why Max abandoned his plans to work on technical solutions fresh out of college to focus on AI safety research, public education, and outreach.
A global priority like pandemics and nuclear war
Max has a background in physics and learned about neural networks while processing images of corn rootworm beetles in the Midwest. He’s enthusiastic about the upside potential of AI systems, but emphatically stresses the need for humans to retain control. He explains:
Max is not a lone voice in the choir; a rising groundswell of AI professionals is joining in the chorus.
In 2023, hundreds of leaders from the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and pioneering AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton, broadly recognized as the ‘Godfather of AI’, signed a statement pushing for global regulation and oversight of AI. It affirmed:
In other words, this technology could potentially kill us all, and making sure it doesn’t should be top of our agendas.
Is that happening? Unequivocally not, Max explains:
Shut me down, and I’ll tell your wife
One of the main concerns about building superintelligent systems is that we have no way of ensuring that their goals align with ours. In fact, all the main LLMs are displaying concerning signs to the contrary.
During tests of Claude Opus 4, Anthropic exposed the model to emails revealing that the AI engineer responsible for shutting the LLM down was having an affair.
The “high-agency” system then exhibited strong self-preservation instincts, attempting to avoid deactivation by blackmailing the engineer and threatening to inform his wife if he proceeded with the shutdown. Tendencies like these are not limited to Anthropic:
In 2023, ChatGPT 4 was assigned some tasks, and it displayed alarmingly deceitful behaviors, convincing a TaskRabbit worker that it was blind, so that the worker would solve a captcha puzzle for it:
More recently, OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off, even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.
If we don’t build it, China will
One of the more recurring excuses for not pulling the plug on superintelligence is the prevailing narrative that we must win the global arms race of our time. Yet, according to Max, this is a myth largely perpetuated by the tech companies. He says:
China has released several statements from high-level officials concerned about a loss of control over superintelligence, and last month called for the formation of a global AI cooperation organization (just days after the Trump administration announced its low-regulation AI policy).
Another myth propagated by AI companies is that AI cannot be stopped. Even if countries push to regulate AI development, all it will take is some whizzkid in a basement to build a superintelligence in their spare time. Max remarks:
Define the future, control the world
Max explains that another challenge to controlling AI development is that hardly any people work in the AI safety field.
Recent data indicate that the number stands at around 800 AI safety researchers: barely enough people to fill a small conference venue.
In contrast, there are more than a million AI engineers and a significant talent gap, with over 500,000 open roles globally as of 2025, and cut-throat competition to attract the brightest minds.
Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent over $350 billion on AI in 2025 alone.
Despite these heartstopping sums, the industry has reached a point where money isn’t enough; even billion-dollar packages are being turned down. How come?
On the eighth day, AI created God
While AI experts can’t accurately predict when superintelligence is achieved, Max warns that if we continue along this trajectory, we could reach “the point of no return” within the next two to five years:
Why, then, for the love of everything holy, are the big tech companies blindly hurtling us all toward the whirling razorblades?
As Elon Musk told an AI panel with a smirk:
Facing down big tech: we don’t have to build superintelligence
Beyond holding on more tightly to our loved ones or checking off items on our bucket lists, is there anything productive we can do to prevent a “lights out” scenario for the human race? Max says there is. But we need to act now.
He points out that humanity has faced similar challenges before, which required pressing global coordination, action, regulation, international treaties, and ongoing oversight, such as nuclear arms, bioweapons, and human cloning. What’s needed now, he says, is “deep buy-in at scale” to produce swift, coordinated global action on a United Nations scale.
Take action to control AI
If you want to play your part in securing humanity’s future, ControlAI has tools that can help you make a difference. It only takes 20-30 seconds to reach out to your local representative and express your concerns, and there’s strength in numbers.
A 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation in the U.S. was recently removed with a 99-to-1 vote after a massive effort by concerned citizens to use ControlAI’s tools, call in en masse, and fill up the voicemails of congressional officers.
You can also help raise awareness about the most pressing issue of our time by talking to your friends and family, reaching out to newspaper editors to request more coverage, and normalizing the conversation, until politicians feel pressured to act. At the very least:
Source: https://cryptoslate.com/people-deserve-to-know-this-threat-is-coming-superintelligence-and-the-countdown-to-save-humanity/
