What If the AI Bulls Are Wrong?

By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press, posted in full here for my paid Substack subscribers only

Sam Altman is bullish on artificial intelligence (AI). He has good reason to be. Altman is a 30-something billionaire who made his fortune raking in investment dollars for his start-up, OpenAI.

Altman claims that AI will, within just a few years, radically transform human life—for the better, or so he hopes. But the OpenAI CEO acknowledges that rapid human extinction is a real possibility, with the odds somewhere between one in 500 and 50/50. He hopes, and claims to believe, that the actual chances that AI will quickly murder every human being on earth are closer to the former estimate than the latter. But since taking even a one in 500 chance of murdering eight billion people is, mathematically speaking, equivalent to actually murdering 16 million people, Altman is, by his own admittedly optimistic acknowledgement, already the happy perpetrator of over two-and-a-half Holocausts.

Why are people like Altman taking a chance on killing us all?