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The Three AI Doomsday Scenarios Experts Worry the Most About

The debate over whether AI can kill us has been everywhere lately, but what exactly would an actual AI catastrophe look like? This week, the “Uncanny Valley” team went looking for answers and found the three real-world scenarios experts worry the most about.


Listen to the full episode here. Subscribe to or follow "Uncanny Valley" wherever you get your podcasts.

Released on 09/18/2026

Transcript

[Zoe] I think that regular people

are taking this really seriously.

Like I think people are pretty freaked out right now,

and this kind of brings us to the like,

how is it actually going to kill us story.

And then I feel like there's kind of three scenarios

roughly that this falls into.

AI starts hacking things and that's really scary.

It's actually already started.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI

have had very high profile incidents

where the agents escaped control

and hacked into other systems

without the knowledge of researchers.

And it was discovered later what had happened.

AI creates a novel bioweapon

and that weapon is released to the public in a way

that is nearly impossible to control and it kills everyone.

And then there's kind of the vague AI just escapes control.

It starts acting on its own.

It doesn't listen to our instructions

and we don't know what could happen,

but we can't do anything about it and that's scary.

But I think there's a distinction

between human guided, right?

Like things happening there versus AI doing it on its own.

I think a lot of people are like,

Oh, how would AI release a bio weapon?

That's crazy.

Which is, yeah, sure, fine.

But there are also bad people in the world who might use AI

to make a bio weapon and then release it, right?

Oh, well, I mean, that scenario is one

that I think is totally like valid.

To me, if you say like giving people access

to information about how to create a bio weapon,

like someone is going to be dumb enough

and reckless enough to actually do it.

AI doing it completely on its own, like I just, again,

we'll talk about the scenario,

but that seems to me a little more farfetched.