Prediction: AI ends humanity not via some super cool/scary/robopocalypse - but as a marketing stunt gone wrong when a Frontier LLM accidentally knocks out water/electric/gas by hacking in and trying to patch them.
Phillip K. Dick meets Idiocracy.
Phillip K. Dick meets Idiocracy.
Sure some new hacks will take place, including on poorly guarded infrastructure and yes it will have some very unfortunate consequences... but also infrastructure is precisely designed to be resilient. There is quite a bit of failsafe, redundancy, etc built in which is precisely why those projects are typically slow and expensive, unlike a random website for a restaurant.
TL;DR: nope, some isolated incidents will happen but without chain reactions.
I saw a very notable scientist talk about topics like this and how they wrestle with them. Things like a "gene drive" [0] are being experimented with in the world [1], and biologists think very hard before doing certain things with the powers they wield. And I have not heard a life scientist laugh off ethical or spreading concerns when a thoughtful question was asked... but maybe the interview you're thinking of was a more lighthearted one?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-gene-d...
Yes there can be terrible catastrophes e.g Fukushima, but what actually happened, within which extremely rare conditions, versus what we freely imagined is quite different.
We might need more reminders of those risks to properly insure such systems don't lead to the collapse of one to another (sadly) but still we manage to learn from it.