A man resigned from his job last week, and the reason he gave should be read slowly.
Jacob Coxon spent three years doing research at two of the companies building the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world. When he left, he did not write about pay or politics. He wrote that the people building this technology earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade, and they are building it anyway.
Eileen Monte
I want to be careful here, because there is a way to write this sentence that turns it into a monster movie, and the monster movie is exactly what keeps a thoughtful person from taking any of it seriously. If you are the kind of reader who has learned to be suspicious of doomsday talk — who remembers every prophecy that came and went, who has watched fear get sold by the pound — then you are the reader I most want to keep. Your suspicion is not a flaw. It is a form of stewardship.
Hold onto it while I lay one number in front of you.
In 2023, a single sentence was published and signed. It read: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. The names beneath it were not names from the fringe. Two of them ran the very companies racing to build the thing. One ran OpenAI. One ran Anthropic. Turing Award winners signed. The men and women closest to the machine put extinction and pandemic and nuclear war on the same shelf, in their own hand, and then went back to work the next morning.
Last week, a safety researcher still inside one of those companies said, in public, that he puts the odds of AI causing human extinction within the next decade at greater than one in 10.
“We are not asked to be brave about numbers. We are asked to be honest about them.”
Another said the pattern he sees is that the more senior the person, the more afraid they are. Set aside whether they are right. Sit for a moment with the arithmetic they are offering us, because arithmetic is a thing this readership knows how to weigh.
We are people who count the cost. It is written into how we read Scripture. A shepherd leaves 99 to go after one, because one is not a rounding error. A builder is told to sit down first and reckon whether he can finish the tower before he lays the foundation. We are not asked to be brave about numbers. We are asked to be honest about them.
So do the honest thing with one in 10. We would not board a plane with a one in 10 chance of going down. We would not hand our children a medicine that failed one time in 10 with death as the failure.
We do not need the number to be certain, or even likely, for it to command our full attention — a one in 10 chance of an outcome you cannot undo is not a small thing dressed up as a large one. It is a large thing, stated plainly, by the people who would know.
And here is the part that should trouble a faithful conscience more than the number itself: The people saying it are not strangers hurling stones from outside the gate. They are the builders. They signed the warning and kept building. That is not the posture of a con.
“The people saying it are not strangers hurling stones from outside the gate. They are the builders.”
A salesman inflates what his product can do; he does not testify under his own name that it might end the world. When the watchman and the builder are the same person, and the building does not stop, we are looking at something older than technology. We are looking at the oldest human problem there is — knowing the cost and paying it anyway, because someone else surely will if we don’t.
I am not going to tell you what law to pass. I don’t know. I am not a scientist.
What I can tell you is what to do with a number when honest people hand it to you. You do not laugh it off, and you do not let it paralyze you. You hold it. You let it be exactly as large as it is.
The congregation that first heard of a coming flood had every reason to keep laughing. The sky was clear. The man building the boat looked ridiculous. The tragedy wasn’t that they lacked information. The information was standing in the yard, hammering. The tragedy was that a clear sky is very persuasive, right up until it isn’t.
The builders have told us what they see. They wrote the number down and signed their names. The only question left for the rest of us is the one we always are asked: Whether we will believe a warning while the sky is still clear, or wait for the kind of proof that arrives too late to be of any use.
Eileen Monte is a transgender woman writing from Fort Worth, Texas. She seeks to take on the political machine working to legislate trans people out of public life and the inherited fear it runs on. She is not a historian or a member of the clergy. Just a person of deep thoughts, stubborn convictions, and five kids who keep her honest.
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