After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters are answering your questions on the reality of the AI threat live nowNdl4321 asks: Is the request for regulation from the AI CEOs actually a tactic to try to shield themselves from future litigation? Considering how the social media companies largely managed to have themselves NOT categorised as publishers and how much legislation they manage to avoid.Aisha: There’s certainly a theatrical – even “psy-op”- quality to the flurry of AI doomsaying over the past weeks. It’s hard to say entirely what concrete developments are at the root of it all. We know that the Hugging Face incident, where a “swarm” of AI agents hacked another company, has been one trigger of the drama. There have been other contributing incidents too – Dario Amodei suggests internal developments at Anthropic have prompted his latest round of blogging, and there’s been some X discourse and doomy muttering about bioweapons. We aren’t in the heads of Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, and so we cannot say how sincere they are, and how much they might have other goals in mind – such as, perhaps, delaying their IPOs until their finances look better. But any company of their size, and with their potential liabilities, would be angling hard to be regulated as favourably as possible. That’s what big companies do.Blake: An AI-enabled dystopia is never inevitable. There is always hope to reverse that outcome. Continue reading...