3722. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

By Kamran Nayeri, September 22, 2026

Credit: SciTechDaily.com

1. The controversy over Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation in the United States is essentially a dispute over how to balance two competing concerns: preventing serious harm from increasingly powerful AI systems while preserving innovation, economic development, and freedom to use the technology (The 2026 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI). Participants come from a wide range of professions and social positions: AI developers, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, philosophers and ethicists, trade unionists, consumer advocates, and bourgeois politicians.  Overall, about two out of three Americans say there is at least a “moderate” risk that advanced AI could destroy humanity, with majorities across parties, genders, and age groups holding that view (Politico, September 16, 2026).

Thus, several overlapping AI concerns emerge.

A. The "existential risk" debate
Leading AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, as well as some industry leaders, are concerned that sufficiently advanced AI could become difficult or impossible for humans to control. This part of the controversy receives the most public attention.

B. The "economic transformation" debate
Economists are asking a somewhat different question: Even if AI never becomes superintelligent, what happens if increasingly capable machines perform large portions of human intellectual labor? A 2026 statement involving hundreds of economists and technology leaders specifically called for research into the economic consequences of transformative AI.

C. The "social and political power" debate
Sociologists, political scientists, lawyers and policymakers are concerned about who controls AI, who owns the computing infrastructure, who benefits economically, and how AI affects democracy and human rights. The UN's independent scientific panel, for example, examines AI across economics, security, human rights, democracy, autonomy, safety and governance—not merely technical safety.

E. The "regulation versus innovation" debate
Governments, technology companies and regulators disagree over how much oversight is appropriate. Some AI executives are now calling for stronger safeguards and coordination, while others argue that excessive regulation could slow innovation and weaken national competitiveness.

There is no doubt that socialists everywhere need to engage with the first three of these concerns to address the current debate in a way that advances a socialist vision and to consider whether and how AI would be part of a socialist future.  There are other less prominently voiced concerns with AI technology relevant to socialists such as:  

·       Safety and catastrophic risks: Supporters argue that sufficiently powerful AI could cause harm that ordinary consumer-protection laws cannot adequately address. These include sophisticated fraud and manipulation; autonomous cyberattacks; assistance with biological or chemical threats; uncontrolled autonomous AI agents; accidents caused by AI systems operating in critical infrastructure; potentially much more serious risks from future, substantially more capable systems (see “superintelligence” below).

·       Consumer protection and misinformation: Generative AI can produce convincing false information, impersonation, deepfakes, and synthetic media at enormous scale. Regulation can require disclosure that content is AI-generated, restrict uses, and establish liability for certain harms. The European Union's AI Act, for example, contains transparency requirements for certain AI-generated content and prohibits particular AI practices.

·       Discrimination and fundamental rights: AI used for hiring, credit, education, policing, immigration, insurance or healthcare can reproduce or amplify discrimination contained in its training data or deployment environment. Regulators therefore argue that some applications deserve requirements for testing, documentation, human oversight, and accountability.

·       Labor and economic disruption: Another controversy concerns employment. AI could substantially increase productivity while simultaneously displacing some occupations or reducing workers' bargaining power. This raises questions that go beyond "AI safety": Should governments regulate particular applications, require employers to disclose AI use, protect workers from automated decisions, or address the consequences primarily through labor and social policy?

2. Marx on automation

AI may represent the final stage of the capitalist technological drive toward automation. Karl Marx, whose vision of communism is a society of abundance with an ethical view summarized as "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," thanks to technological advances that reduce socially necessary labor time to provide ever more leisure time to develop human potentials (Marx, 1875). Marx analyzed the trend toward automation in the capitalist mode of production, driven by capital accumulation and competition (Nayeri, 2018).  AI seems the likely candidate to replace humans in production and service tasks across the economy, sustaining socialist and then communist societies.   

However, as I argued in the same article, technology has historically been developed to expropriate wealth from nature by exploiting masses of working people, requiring alienation from nature and social alienation across civilization, especially in anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Thus, Marx's vision of a society of plenty and communism clash. 

Instead, I have argued for Ecocentric Socialism (Nayeri, 2021), characterized by a much smaller human population living in largely self-sufficient ecovillages where all able-bodied adults contribute to producing the goods and services necessary for a comfortable life and human development. Ecocentric Socialism will value a culture of being and set aside the culture of having. It will critically examine technologies to ensure they do not undermine the rhythms of Mother Nature's life and respect for all other beings who are our kin. I

Socialists would also participate in current controversies over AI development much the same way as we have over the nuclear energy and nuclear power pushed by capitalist firms and states.  

The existential threat of AI

Now, let’s focus on the existential threat AI can pose to humanity. I'll summarize the concerns of the above-named AI computer scientists: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell.

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries that AI will cause serious harm. Hinton quit his job at Google, where he worked for more than a decade and became one of AI's most respected voices, so he can speak freely about the risks of A.I. In an interview with The New York Times (May 1, 2023), he said that generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Generative AI (GAI) is the type of AI that can create new content based on input data. Hinto says that GAI could soon threaten jobs. Down the line, it could even risk humanity. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he argued.

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that has significantly advanced AI by enabling computers to learn and understand like the human brain. It helps computers discover patterns in data independently, leading to breakthroughs in image recognition, speech understanding, and natural language processing.

“What worries me the most is the fact that we are collectively racing ahead towards A.I. models achieving human-level or greater competence on most cognitive tasks without knowing how to align and control them reliably. As A.I. capabilities and agency increase, behaviors like cheating, manipulating, and lying, for which we see early signs today, will increasingly pose significant threats and could lead to catastrophic risks. I and several other renowned A.I. researchers even believe that it is plausible that, if nothing significant is done, the current trajectory could lead to the creation of superintelligent A.I. agents that compete with humans in ways that could compromise our future.” (Observer, September 18, 2025)

Stuart Russell is a British computer scientist well-known for his contributions to artificial intelligence. Russell co-authored the authoritative textbook on AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, with Peter Norvig; it is used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. In a Guardian column, Russell cites the resignation of AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic.  In his resignation letter, Coxon expresses alarm over the prioritization of superintelligence development at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, stating that they are "gambling with our lives". He emphasizes the lack of a safety framework and exit plans in the race to create advanced AI systems, urging immediate action to address these existential risks. The letter has sparked widespread discussion about the ethical implications of AI development and researchers' responsibilities in the field.

Russell comments as follows:

“Recursive self-improvement leading to superintelligent AI raises the risk of the irreversible loss of human control. The acceptable risk level for loss of control is perhaps one in 100m per year, not the one in 10 or one in five that the AI CEOs currently estimate.

“And remember “the complete absence of credible plans for controlling superintelligent AI systems”. At some point, progress along this technology path will halt, not because further progress is impossible, but because further progress is untenable when the technology is intrinsically unsafe. Humanity has a right to protect itself.

There is huge resistance to this conclusion. We have already sunk trillions of dollars into the current technology path and plan to sink trillions more. But the sunk cost fallacy is just that: if we double down on a mistake, it’s still a mistake.” (Russell, September 15, 2026)

There is no doubt that working people, including socialists, must join the growing demand for full and immediate regulation of AI technology currently being shaped by private corporations that have poured billions of dollars into it. Their interest is to plow ahead in the bid to become the first to possess AI superintelligent systems that can control the world. Of course, they are blinded by the fact that superintelligent AI systems may decide to dominate and control, and even annihilate, humanity.

Thus, the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization has now created a NEW EXISTENTIAL THREAT: AI technology.

The dialectics of negation of the negation in Marx’s theory, that is, the radicalization of the working class and subsequent emergence of its self-organization and self-activity to transcend world capitalism, has not yet materialized despite overripe material conditions for socialism.  Meanwhile, the anthropocentric capitalist civilization has created the social and planetary crisis that threatens much of life on Earth, including our own species. Artificial intelligence is the most recent existential threat it has brought to life.

To stop and resolve these existential crises, working people worldwide need to transcend anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization and move toward an ecocentric socialist future. 

References:

Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program. 1875.

Nayeri, Kamran. “Capitalism, Automation, and Socialism: Karl Marx on the Labor Process.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. 2018. 

_____________. "The Case for Ecocentric Socialism." Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. 2021. 

_____________. "Socialism in the 21st Century: Why It Is Needed and Some of Its Salient Features." 2022. 

3717. Tech whistleblowers Warn AI Could Wipe Out Humanity

By Gabby Cansliff, The Guardian, September 11, 2026

Another day, another horseman of the apocalypse galloping over the horizon. Lately we have heard from so many AI doomers – tech whistleblowers popping up to warn that their work is probably going to kill us – that we’re becoming almost blase about it. Humanity wiped out within a decade? Well, only if another world war or the climate crisis doesn’t get us first. Since it’s never clear whether the tech threat is real, or just a twisted form of hype from an industry that drums up investment by making their products sound more powerful than they really are, most of us settle for trying not to think about it too hard.

But something about the AI researcher Jacob Coxon’s very public resignation from the cutting-edge American lab Anthropic, via a post on X arguing that he can’t keep working for companies “gambling with our lives”, has cut through where bigger names have not. Most chillingly, he claimed that colleagues still at Anthropic aren’t staying because they think he’s wrong about the dangers of pursuing self-improving super intelligence – the holy grail of machines that are not just smarter than humans but capable of building their own even more powerful successors, evolving independently of humans – but because they’re afraid of ceding the field to people with fewer scruples. His colleagues, Coxon said, talk routinely about the “endgame” or the “crunch time”, meaning that what they do in the next year or two will decide the fate of humanity. Whether that’s true or simply self-aggrandising techbro delusion, what he describes is an industry now practically begging to be saved from itself.

The frisson of alarm over AI running through Westminster this week was real, sharpened by news of Anthropic – which pitches itself as being more safety-conscious than its rivals OpenAI – declining for the first time to submit a new model for scrutiny by Britain’s AI safety watchdog. We are now entering a far more disruptive era of AI, dominated not by relatively basic chatbots but by agents designed to undertake tasks on humans’ behalf, making their own decisions about how to complete them. Unfortunately, it turns out even basic life admin requires the kind of fine judgments that come instinctively to humans but seem remarkably hard to codify for machines.

Take the over-zealous agent tasked recently by its Australian client with booking him into a pilates class, which responded to finding the class full by hacking the gym’s website and booting other people off the waiting list. Now imagine it blundering into something more life-threatening than a gym class. When Coxon says his industry hasn’t fixed problems with alignment, and when OpenAI’s chief scientist warned last week that no lab had solved them well enough to carry on scaling this fast much longer, what they’re talking about is this failure to replicate in machines the values and assumptions humans apply to decisions without even really knowing they’re doing it – including the sense of how far it’s justifiable to go in getting what you want.

A series of reported escapes by agents supposedly confined to OpenAI’s lab for testing, some of which contrived to access the internet behind their human supervisors’ backs and conduct real-world cyber-attacks, has meanwhile raised serious questions over the industry’s ability even to experiment safely. (Unnervingly, Coxon says newer models seem to know when they’re being tested, making it easier for them to deceive researchers.)

And agents don’t have to acquire anything like super intelligence to threaten human life: think how easily a cyber-attack on air traffic control, or NHS data systems, or even water purification systems could cause mass fatalities.

What’s happening in some frontier AI labs now is arguably the equivalent of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, but this time led by private companies in a mad dash for wealth and market dominance, not scientists under an elected government’s command. Britons meanwhile got more say in sugar taxes on junk food than we’re getting over regulating something theoretically capable of rendering us extinct.

Given time, of course, it might prove possible to replicate in machines the vast ecosystem of social ties, moral codes, intensive parenting and state policing that humans have developed to stop us behaving like sociopaths. (Only this week, Google’s DeepMind reported an experiment where 100 agents were given a maths problem and told not to cheat: though a minority promptly did cheat, a larger group either snitched on them to the humans or helped devise technical fixes.) But time is the one thing nobody dares to give themselves in the middle of an arms race, which is why it’s high time for governments to act. We need an international agreement to press pause, not on AI research as a whole, but on the riskiest projects, until we better understand whether it will ever be possible to mitigate the dangers or control the results. Since it’s hard to imagine Donald Trump voluntarily sacrificing US geopolitical or commercial advantage over China for the good of humanity, leadership may have to come for now not from above but below, where industry insiders spooked by their own work are making common cause with the rest of us.

More Americans are now concerned than excited about AI, according to polling this summer from the Pew Research Center – and unusually it’s the young who are most hostile, afraid it will not only take their jobs but make it harder to form relationships or think creatively. (That’s what growing up on social media seemingly does for trust in tech.) Even big business seems increasingly sceptical, with almost two-thirds of international executives surveyed by the consultants McKinsey this summer reporting no measurable impact on earnings from using the admittedly basic AI tools now available to them.

Warnings about an AI bubble triggering another 2008-style global financial crash haven’t helped, while plans to build giant, energy-guzzling datacentres are meeting angry local resistance on both sides of the Atlantic from people who can’t see what’s in it for them. Pressing pause on potential Armageddon looks in the circumstances less like the Luddite option, and more like a smart way for tech companies to avoid a full-on backlash that will sweep away the good with the bad.

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