Reposted by Steven
AI safety expert Timnit Gebru says tech leaders are promoting greatly exaggerated claims about "superintelligence" and "existential risk" as a way to distract from the real threat — their own unregulated companies.
democracynow.org
The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: “Alternative Nobel” Winner Timnit Gebru
We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind...
![[Left side, an illustration of the "Virgin" character (from the Virgin vs. Chad meme format) modified into a robot. His head is a retro computer monitor with a glowing red dot on the screen, and his body has thin metallic limbs. A computer mouse hangs from his back by a wire, and loose paperclips float around his legs.]
"the virgin "AGI existential risk"
- programmer LARP fantasy that makes coding the single most important skill for saving humanity
- fake and made up
- entirely based on thought experiments
- assumes that there's this vaguely defined concept known as "intelligence" that can be linearly increased as if it were a mathematical quantity
- projects an anthropomorphic drive toward control and power onto algorithms that just do statistics to spit out words; colonialist self-report
- Zero evidence
- sponsored by billionaires who want to make their technology seem more important than it is
- blackmails you from the future using faulty logic; doesn't actually make any sense
- "oh no, i guess we have to build the Doom Machine now. i guess the course of technological progress is inevitable, oh well""
[Right side, an illustration of the "Chad" character, replaced by a globe of the Earth. A large fire burns at the top of the globe, and three black oil derricks are on the yellow landmass, which is shaped like a facial profile. He has muscular blue arms and legs and wears yellow shoes.]
"the Chad Global Warming
- incomprehensibly complex and interconnected polycrisis
- reveals deep-rooted flaws with the dominant politico-economic paradigm; demands a fundamental shift of human value systems by its sheer physical existence
- verified by the entire scientific community
- billionaires don't want you to think about it because it is too scary
- resists ideological simplification
- will actually kill you
- divine retribution for fossil capital's greed and wanton exploitation of the natural world
- doesn't even need intelligence to threaten humanity's survival"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4djfp3b27soxcfkxhirydi6d/bafkreiat4ku4vyd744yxmb54e6cv7smkypqxptl3tqas2jnzs3f6fhzw3q)
