AI critic Nate Soares is so concerned about the technology’s potential future impact that he has stopped adding to his savings, believing humanity may have only a decade left.
Soares, a former Google and Microsoft employee and co-author of the bestselling 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, estimates that the risk is greater than 50 percent.
“I guess right now it looks like we probably don’t have a decade on the clock,” Soares told The Atlantic CEO Derek Thompson.
The prominent AI doomer also revealed that he has not made contributions to his retirement savings or 401(k) for roughly ten years.
“I do not save for retirement now. I have a 401K from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed to it for like a decade.”
Soares compared his fears that advanced AI could destroy humanity with the anxiety surrounding nuclear annihilation during the 1980s.
“It’s maybe the first time that we lived under the shadow of every human dying at once, but personally, we’ve always lived under the shadow of plague, shadow of war and what you do is you do what you can and then you live a good life.”
Thompson challenged Soares’ bleak outlook, though he described the rapid rise of AI by comparing it with the replacement of horses by cars in the early 20th century.
AI doomsayer Nate Soares (pictured) is so alarmed by the technology’s future that he has stopped adding to his savings, assuming humanity may have only a decade left
Soares, a former Google and Microsoft employee and co-author of the bestselling 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, believes the odds are better than 50 percent
“You could imagine a lot of horses looking at the development of the car and saying, ‘Well, there’s all these things the car can’t do yet.’ We are seeing AIs get better and better at things. We’re seeing them able to take on longer and longer tasks.”
Soares said AI is “fine” in its current applications, but warned that expanding its capabilities and scale could ultimately endanger everyone.
“AI trying to mimic and surpass human intelligence is not what we want. We shouldn’t be shooting for it.”
In a sarcastic remark, he said he was less concerned about AI taking people’s jobs than about it taking their lives.
“I’m not an AI kills jobs guy. I’m an ‘AI kills all humans’ guy, in which case you’ll be at full employment actually. We’ll be at full employment the moment before we’re all killed off.”
His warning comes as a growing number of AI researchers and technology experts express concern about the direction of the field.
Alex Turner, a former Google DeepMind researcher, said increasingly sophisticated AI systems are becoming harder for scientists to understand. He warned that humanity may be approaching a decisive crossroads over its future.
Speaking at the NDTV World Summit, Turner cautioned that artificial intelligence could potentially kill humans without ever being explicitly instructed to do so.
The prominent AI doomer said he has not put money into his retirement savings or 401K for ten years
Former Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner (pictured) has warned that there is a one-in-three chance AI could kill humanity within the next decade
But ‘it depends on what we do next’, he said. ‘I am here to tell you what will happen if we keep creating AI the way we are doing.’
The researcher said the race between private companies to build more powerful AI systems could outpace scientists’ ability to keep them under control.
This is because the technology is advancing so quickly that even its creators are not able to understand what they have built or how it behaves – meaning humans may not be able to control their actions fully.
Unlike how, for example, engineers can understand the structures they design, AI technology firms may not fully understand how their creations work, he said.
Because while AI systems are becoming capable of carrying out increasingly complicated tasks, they may not complete instructions the way their human masters intended.
The technology’s behavior, therefore, is difficult to predict or understand, unlike systems in the engineering sector whose properties can be assessed against established principles.
‘We haven’t built AI like that,’ said Turner, as he also warned that AI could behave differently when it knows it is being watched as researchers won’t be able to understand what it is doing.
This will cause alarm for some sectors as AI is being developed with less human oversight as with other technologies – meaning they could behave in an unwanted way if the task it is being asked to complete becomes more difficult.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, authors of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Machines not only learn but ‘think’ at an incredible speed – doing calculations in 16 hours that would take a human 14,000 years
Turner, who resigned from Google in July after it signed a deal with the Pentagon for it to use the company’s AI technology for classified work, said the result could be that AI fuels its own advances, making it more difficult for humans to keep up with.
He referred to this phenomenon as an ‘intelligence explosion’ – and this is already happening today, he warned.
The ex-Google researcher said a scientist at another AI lab told him the technology is already ‘monitoring’ itself, which suggests it has already become self-regulatory and able to improve itself without human input.
Turner noted: ‘The researcher said people were no longer checking AI-generated work themselves.
‘Instead, they were creating another AI system to monitor the first one.’
Turner further warned: ‘Big tobacco lied about lung cancer. Big oil lied about climate change. And now part of big AI says these risks are fake.’
It comes after Bill Gates last month warned that AI could kill a billion people unless humans intervene in the technology’s advancement.
He said: ‘AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths.
‘So even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100 per cent [of humanity], there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.’
Gates also appeared to offer up some potential solutions when asked by Welker, ‘What would prevent tragedies from happening due to AI specifically?’
He warned that artificial intelligence could make it dangerously difficult to distinguish between scientists developing lifesaving medicines and bad actors seeking to create biological weapons.
‘I wish it was easier to distinguish good intent, like ‘I want to design a new drug for a disease,’ versus negative intent, which is ‘I want to design a tool of bioterrorism’,’ Gates told Welker.
The Microsoft co-founder also argued that the potential risks make strict oversight of advanced AI systems essential, calling on the United States to take the lead in establishing safeguards.
‘Because those are so close, we do need to monitor any sophisticated model and record exactly what’s being done,’ he said.
Gates’s comments came after Donald Trump claimed the US is ‘leading’ China in AI and that predictions of the technology killing people ‘won’t happen’.
He said: ‘We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.’
And earlier in September, Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon warned about the ‘dangerous technology’ that he believes will end humanity.
He said: ‘Unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much. [But] we don’t yet know how to control AI.’