Commentary: How would AI kill all humans? Here are the top 5 scenarios

3. BIOWEAPONS

Humanity could be killed by a superintelligent AI making and releasing some dangerous new bioweapon into the atmosphere. This is, in fact, one outcome of the AI 2027 scenario by the AI Futures Project, a non-profit dedicated to forecasting the impacts of advanced AI.

This risk was made more concrete last month, when researchers at Stanford University announced they’d used a genetic language AI model to synthesise 16 new viruses.

Worryingly, they just sent the genetic sequences off to a mail-order lab and it sent the viruses back in test tubes. The whole experiment cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars at most.

The good news here is that it’s remarkably hard to kill everyone with a new virus. To do that, you need a virus that’s very transmissible, so it spreads far and wide. But it’s a rule of biology – viruses that spread easily are typically less fatal. By contrast, if a virus is very fatal, transmissibility tends to go down, as most people infected die before there’s time to spread the infection.

COVID-19 killed less than 1 per cent of humanity. The deadliest pandemic in recorded history was the Black Death, when the plague killed more than one-third of Europe’s population in the 13th century. However, even the plague would likely be much less deadly today due to our increased medical knowledge and better sanitation.

4. NUCLEAR WAR

What if AI got into the nuclear command and control chain and started a nuclear war? We’ve come close to nuclear war by mistake several times in the past 50 years.

We’re told that nuclear command and control is completely disconnected from the internet. But, as we saw in 2010, Iran’s nuclear centrifuges got taken out by a computer worm called Stuxnet, thought to have been brought in on a USB stick. AI can also give the military false intelligence, which could lead to irreparable actions.

The good news here is that nuclear stockpiles are down. But they are still enough perhaps to take out half of us. And it wouldn’t be by the nuclear blast itself, but the famine in the nuclear winter that would follow.