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AI Safety Expert Stops Saving for Retirement because He Believes AI Could Wipe Out Humanity Within a Decade

Soares says advanced AI has a greater-than-50% chance of causing human extinction within a decade, prompting him to stop contributing to retirement savings.

  • Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute , has stopped contributing to his retirement account, citing his belief that advanced artificial intelligence could cause human extinction within a decade.
  • Soares told The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that he estimates an above 50 per cent chance of AI-caused human extinction within a decade, informing his decision to forgo retirement savings.
  • Before joining the Berkeley-based nonprofit, Soares worked as an engineer at Google and Microsoft, spending more than 12 years in AI alignment to ensure systems act as intended.
  • Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk offers a contrasting view, predicting that future AI advances will create a "universal high income" and make retirement savings "irrelevant."
  • Soares argues that governments should halt general-purpose AI training, focusing instead on specialized applications like cancer research, maintaining that catastrophe is not inevitable.
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According to him, sufficiently powerful artificial intelligence could develop goals that are completely incompatible with human ones, avoid any control, improve itself independently, and build automated infrastructure to operate without humans.

·Ljubljana, Slovenia
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  • 67% of the sources lean Left
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Business Insider broke the news in New York, United States on Tuesday, October 27, 2026.
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