"AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace cover art

"AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace

"AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace

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A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody to be unhappy about it’.

I’m personally skeptical that this is really the main thing going on, since it seems unlikely that many people are really mostly concerned for their own non-death out of selfless regard for the feelings of others. I’m also skeptical that this would be their view on a bunch more consideration.

So to help with the consideration—

My guess is that an important thing going on here is that the ‘everyone dying at once’ image seems kind of like a thought experiment—abstract, hypothetical, neat, not very sinister. Also, you literally can never see it, so it feels pretty surreal.

But it is interesting that we even have this assumption that everyone will die together.

It's true that in some prominent AI catastrophe stories, a single AI system suddenly emerges fantastically more powerful than anyone else and builds technology to quickly kill everyone, perhaps before they notice.

But this doesn’t seem like the bulk of [...]

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First published:
June 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/23HybCsJ7KYW4v7tP/ai-catastrophe-more-like-a-genocide-than-a-thought

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