mathbabe

If you listen to professional AI Safety folks working at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the enormous AI think tanks, you’ll hear countless scenarios where AI causes enormous human misery and even extinction (e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369 or https://x.com/EvanHub/status/2097497037956891126). What they aren’t admitting is that they have invented a tool that can take down the internet, and with it and our modern way of life.

If you look at their AI doomsday scenarios, they all start more less like this: humans get comfortable handing over their agency, control of their finances, and/or control of the energy grid and/or weapons systems to AI agents, which act obediently and seamlessly, and then the agents somehow decide, or are programmed by bad actors to decide to kill everyone, and since they control everything by this time, it’s pretty easy.

The problem with that scenario is that AI agents are not seamless actors. Indeed they have already been known to (be programmed to) scheme, to hack, and to commit crimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/ai-hugging-face-afd-germany-election.html). They keep breaking into things because, essentially, they’ve been given a goal and that’s the way they found to achieve their goal. They also respond really creatively to encouragement (https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-riemann-hypothesis-anthropic-openai-22f98a87).

They also make mistakes all the time, sometimes telling kids to kill themselves, but mostly just really dumb stuff. In a word, they are untrustworthy.

Going back to the doomsday scenarios, I don’t buy them. I don’t think we actually will hand over our agency, or the financial system, or the energy grid, or our weapons systems, to AI. I don’t think we will trust them. In fact, we already don’t trust them.

Look at the public uprisings already in progress against the data centers. This isn’t only because those data centers make air dirty, possibly raise energy prices, and don’t deliver very many jobs. It’s also because the public has been told the result of data centers is more AI, and the result of more AI is fewer jobs. People tend to like their jobs and therefore they tend to distrust AI and the data centers that create them.

This is not to say there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to AI. Consider the kind of harm and thievery that can and will happen once organized, tech-savvy criminal rings from China, North Korea, Russia, and India get hold of armies of AI agents and break into, say, regional banks. What with AI’s capacity to fake out voice recognition, and given their personality profiles on us, combined with their proven ability to hack systems, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that AI agents under the control of criminals are adept at getting control of and cleaning out bank accounts at scale.

Here’s a not-crazy prediction: in two years – maybe less! – banks will have disconnected themselves from the internet, because the internet will be overrun by criminal AI. We will be forced to walk to the bank in person to withdraw money, and we will do so in cash, because all digital wallets will be untrustworthy. It’s back to the 1980’s.

For that matter, I’m willing to guess the energy grid will also need to get disconnected from the internet because of the risk of hacking by nefarious agents that want to hold our infrastructure ransom. The same thing will happen to the rest of the world soon after that, because the risks will have become totally obvious and the harm concretely felt.

Note this isn’t a new idea – one reason voting is secure in this country is because voting machines are not connected to the internet. I’m very much hoping that’s also true for weapons systems.

What terrified AI folks seem to forget is that AI agents are digital entities. Fortunately for us, even if they were motivated to kill us, they don’t have fists and cannot come alive out of the internet to punch us out. Unfortunately for us, they also don’t have faces, so we also cannot punch them in the nose when they steal our money and jobs. But we can find out who programmed to steal our stuff and prosecute those people.

The real negative consequences of AI will be huge externalities in terms of security breaches and privacy loss. We only see the very tip of the iceberg in terms of the cost to businesses and our way of life so far. On the other hand, long term we might find ourselves better off when we free ourselves from the internet.