# [The only defense against existential risk is AI](https://x.com/vitrupo/status/1909742911140569168)  *** <iframe title="LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on AI, Trump and the future of technology - YouTube" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xqi9wLI3RN8?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" allowfullscreen="" allow="fullscreen" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> #### [[👤Reid Hoffman]]: The problem is that people don’t really understand how to think about existential risk. If killer robots were the only threat to humanity, then I’d agree it’s a serious problem. But we already have many existential risks—like pandemics, climate change, nuclear war, and even asteroids. So the real question is: when we introduce something new, like AI, does it make the overall risk worse or better? Yes, AI adds some chance of a super-intelligent robot going out of control. That risk isn’t zero. But today, people can already create biological weapons that could collapse society—and they don’t need AI to do it. AI might make it easier, but the only real defense I can see against these threats is also AI. If you look at the full list of existential risks, AI could help reduce many of them—like tracking and stopping pandemics, fighting climate change, or identifying and dealing with dangerous asteroids. So overall, even without perfect control, I think AI improves our chances. How much better? A lot better. #🤖Reid_Hoffman *** - [[What will we do when someone like Facebook or a foreign adversary builds AI systems that can hypnotize people? The solution is itself AI]] - [["If we can make an AI system that is materially better than all of OpenAI at doing AI research, that does feel like an important discontinuity... the model is going to get so good so fast... plan for the model to get rapidly smarter"]] - [[Investment in AI will soon exceed the US defense budget and the most devastating AI safety scenarios can be avoided if the US leads in AI, but the US government is investing 3-10x less than China]] - [[AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do... we stopped hiring about a year ago]] - [[The single greatest potential of AI is to transform biology from a life science into life engineering to improve healthcare and he "can't imagine" what the field will be like in 10 years]] - [[We need to confront the reality that we are building hyper-intelligent AI—more intelligent than we can comprehend—and the best we can do is instill our values and make sure it grows up well because we won't be able to control it]] - [[Human life is a very rare state of matter and the best way to preserve our existence is to maximize the growth of civilization by accelerating its optimization, and AI is a fundamental technology that enables us to scale civilization to the stars]] - [[AI will help understand the mysteries of the universe and consciousness, and could cure all diseases within a decade as well as providing fusion power and abundant clean water]] - [[The right answer to climate change is technological rather than policy, but policy can destroy tech responses and undermine people trying to build solutions.]] - [[It will take AI to defend against the darker side of AI because it will produce cyberattacks and hacks at superhuman speeds]] - [[Building AI is "the last human philosophical project" because mechanizing the mind will be a bridge between mathematics and philosophy]] - [[A lot of what is considered risky about AI comes from science fiction and what can best mitigate the actual risks we face is AI itself]] - [[Curing diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, and ultimately the aging process itself, are exactly the kinds of problems that AI can solve]] - [[The nuclear fusion company backed by Sam Altman will surprise the world by showing fusion electrical generation next year, becoming the basis for a "radical transformation of the energy system" due to safe, cheap power]] - [[AI has a important role to play in mitigating climate change by modeling the effects of geoengineering efforts such as spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth, which has the potential to cool the planet by up to 1°C]]