BBC: Tech billionaires are preparing for the end of the world
Mark Zuckerberg, according to BBC sources, began construction on his Kulau Ranch estate in Hawaii in 2014, connected to an underground shelter with its own energy and food reserves. Although he calls the shelter a “basement”, the media and neighbors speculate that it is a bunker.
Similar activities have been observed among other tech leaders. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, spoke of “apocalypse insurance”, while Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI proposed an underground shelter for top scientists before the release of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Many tech leaders believe that AGI is inevitable. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, claims it is coming “sooner than people think,” and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind predicts it will be in the next 5-10 years. However, experts such as Wendy Hall and Babak Hodjat warn that this requires fundamental scientific breakthroughs and that AGI is not expected to appear overnight.
Supporters of AGI and ASI (superintelligence) believe that the technology will provide solutions to diseases, climate change and energy sustainability. However, there are also dangers, namely misuse by terrorists or the potential for AI to decide on its own to consider humanity a threat.
Governments are already taking steps to control it, such as regulations in the US and the establishment of the AI Safety Institute in the UK.
However, critics such as Neil Lawrence believe that the whole discussion is overblown and that the focus should be on the real problems that AI is already creating for people. Even today’s AI tools, while impressive, lack consciousness and “feeling,” which distinguishes the technology from human intelligence.