The first time we speak, Joep Meindertsma is not in a good place. He bursts into tears as he describes a conversation in which he warned his niece about the risk of artificial intelligence causing social collapse. Then she had a panic attack. “I cry every other day,” he says, speaking via Zoom from his home in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Every time I say goodbye to my parents or friends, it feels like it could be the last time.”
Meindertsma, 31 years old and co-owner of a database company, has been interested in AI for a few years now. But he really started to worry about the threat the technology could pose to humanity when Open AI released its latest language model, GPT-4, in March. Since then, he has seen the huge success of ChatGPT chatbot – first based on GPT-3 and then GPT-4 – show the world how far AI has progressed and Big Tech companies are racing to catch up. And he’s seen pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, warn of the dangers associated with the systems they helped create. “AI capabilities are developing much faster than almost everyone predicted,” says Meindertsma. “We risk social collapse. We risk the extinction of humanity.”
Meindertsma stopped working a month before our conversation. He was so preoccupied with the idea that AI is going to destroy human civilization that he struggled to think of anything else. He had to do something, he felt, to avert disaster. Soon after, he launched Pause AI, a grassroots protest group campaigning to halt, as the name suggests, the development of AI. And since then he has gathered a small group of followers who have staged protests in Brussels, London, San Francisco and Melbourne. These demonstrations were small – fewer than 10 people at a time – but Meindertsma made friends in high places. He says he has been invited to speak with officials in both the Dutch parliament and the European Commission.
The idea that AI could wipe out humanity sounds extreme. But it’s an idea that’s gaining traction in both the tech sector and mainstream politics. Hinton stepped down from his position at Google in May and embarked on a global round of interviews raising the specter that humans are no longer able to master AI as technology advances. That same month, industry leaders, including the CEOs of AI labs Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, signed a letter recognizing the “risk of extinction”, and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak became the first head of government to publicly admit that he also believes that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.
Meindertsma and his followers offer a glimpse into how these warnings are trickling through society, creating a new phenomenon of AI fear and giving a younger generation – many of whom are already deeply concerned about climate change – another reason to panic about the future. A survey by pollster YouGov found that the number of people worried that artificial intelligence could lead to an apocalypse has risen sharply over the past year. Hinton denies that he wants AI development halted temporarily or indefinitely. But his public statements about the risk AI poses to humanity have resulted in a group of young people feeling there is no other choice.
To different people, “existential risk” means several things. “The main scenario I am personally concerned about is social collapse due to large-scale hacking,” says Meindertsma, explaining that he is concerned about AI being used to create cheap and accessible cyberweapons that can be used by criminals. used to mean “the whole internet.” This is a scenario that experts say is extremely unlikely. But Meindertsma is still concerned about the resilience of the banking system and food distribution. “People will not be able to find food in a city. People will fight,” he says. “Many billions I think will die.”
